But the stupidity is in his expectation of cashing in on this, not in the trademark being issued, which is what people keep complaining about. It's probably just a publicity stunt, really.
I'm so confused and amazed at the lack of understand of the difference between a patent, a copyright, and a trademark around these parts. Trademarking something does not mean that no one can ever use it again for any reason at all.
Probably the same kind of person who would think a common word like "apple" is trademarkable. Y'know, a totally normal person who is correct. It takes a special kind of idiot, though, to think that that means no one can ever, ever use the word/emoticon in any context again without paying them.
"Smart" is less precise than "high ability," which can be easily modified to talk about "high intellectual ability," "high creative ability," "high spatial ability," "high verbal ability," etc when needed. I'm not just talking about teacher referring to kids in their classes here, I'm talking about a field of research and development that needs operationalized terms.
Yeah, slashdot is all about damning research and relying on anecdotes. Any idea how many kids you've had over the years who were grade-skipped in the past but were so well-adjusted that you didn't even know it?
Thank you for your anecdote. Sadly, it does not cancel out decades of research. Here, I will give my own anecdote to cancel yours: My husband skipped the third grade, and not only did he suffer no ill effects from it at any point, his fourth grade teacher wanted to skip him to fifth because she didn't realize he'd already been skipped.
You see, they have devised these things called "statistics" so that we don't have to play dueling anecdotes all day. And the statistics from many, many studies show that the vast majority of grade-skipped children have no negative social or emotional effects from it. Most of those who do had problems before the skipping and the problems just weren't fixed by the skipping.
In psychological/educational terms, there is a difference between ability and achievement. Ability refers to things like IQ that measure "what you bring to the table," so to speak, and can only be developed to a limited extent. Achievement refers to things like grades and end-of-year test scores - someone with lower ability can work hard and achieve the same as someone with higher ability.
Unfortunately, we are saddled with the term "gifted" thanks to Louis Terman, who both created the Stanford-Binet IQ test and did the first large-scale longitudinal study of intelligence (which is still going on with the few remaining participants in their 80s and 90s). It was in that study that he classified people with an IQ of 140 or higher "gifted," and the terminology stuck. Personally, I can't stand it and try not to use it, in favor of the more straightforward and less loaded "high ability." But it will be a very long time before "gifted" goes anywhere.
BTW, that article is dead wrong with regards to grade-skipping. Over 50 years of research has shown that in most cases students who are skipped a grade have no negative social or emotional outcomes from it, and often it's positive socially. This research is summarized in the report A Nation Deceived.
I'm sure they'd absolutely LOVE to not sell a single thing to the millions of people who already own a DS or DS Lite, and ONLY sell this to the people who buy a system that won't even exist in the country these books are being sold in for months.
There's no reason they can't release this, AND do what you're suggesting once the DSi actually, y'know, exists. No reason to ignore possible profit now when it wouldn't interfere with profit later.
And then combine that with putting your games at a price people can afford/are willing to pay.
Clearly, even people who buy new games aren't actually willing/able to pay $50 for a game. They're only willing to pay $30 for a game - putting $50 up front then getting $20 back by reselling it. Then the used gamers snap it up for $35. If all those $50 games dropped their prices to $30, would the used gamers decide to buy the game a few weeks earlier for a lower price? Enough to make up for the price drop? And if that's combined with games that people don't want to resell within two weeks, it seems like you'd actually have a viable new game market.
Caffeine is certainly an iffy one, but I seriously doubt you're going to find studies that the internet is physically addicting. Or that either chocolate or sex is physically addicting for the majority of people.
Hell, cocaine is legal for medical use right now. They gave it to my sister when she was TWO to widen her nasal passages after she got a rock stuck up her nose.
That's right, marijuana is Schedule 1 but cocaine is only Schedule 2.
As for non-prescription use, I'm in favor of legalizing anything that's not physically addictive for the majority of the population. Things that are addictive, sure people should just not start if they want to stay healthy, but after a few uses they're not capable of making an informed decision. (Of course, that means nicotine is out, which I do think is how things should be but I know they never will be.) If it's not addictive, though, you're choosing it every time you do it, it's up to you.
Ok, taking a bit of a step back from this, I realize that we are getting waaaayyyy off-topic with this whole argument.
My point was that there are fewer women the higher up the academic ladder you go in most hard sciences (apparently geology is an exception). Now, maybe you don't give a shit. That's fine. But there are people who do give a shit, who want the best and the brightest in their programs regardless of gender.
What I'm saying is, all this stuff we're arguing about is why women are not choosing that path. Like you said, everyone has to make choices in life. Definitely true. Women are choosing not to pursue PhDs and faculty positions in the hard sciences. Some of this may be lack of interest or ability, but I'm saying that there are other issues that are also influencing this choice.
A woman is given the opportunity to enter a PhD program. For many women, the thought process may go as follows: "Wow, the pay sucks. But we can afford it if we live in University housing. Oh, but if I decide to have a baby anytime in the next five years, we lose that housing. And my health insurance. Fuck that noise, I'm taking the high-paying industry job." She can have both a career and children, just not one that involves that PhD program. Maybe you don't give a shit if she goes into that PhD program, but I'm saying that for the people who do, this is part of her thought process.
The choices that academia has historically presented to women are much harsher ones than other industries. Maybe you think that's perfectly fair; after all, there are advantages to choosing academia. But academia can't both retain that system and continue to moan "Whyyyyyyy won't they choose meeeeee?" For many women, it has just made itself an unattractive choice because they cannot get some of the benefits that they can get in other industries.
Because people in academia do care that women aren't choosing it, they are slowly making changes. Many schools have significantly improved maternity leave for grad students in the past decade. They've introduced flexible tenure clocks. These things benefit both sexes, really, because men also have more opportunity to balance family and work; it's just that, historically, men have been pressured to prioritize work while women have been pressured to prioritize family, so when these kinds of family-friendly policies were not in place it was more likely to drive away women than men.
So yeah. You can bitch all you want about how women have to make choices. You're right, they do. And if you're 100% ok with that choice NOT being to pursue a PhD or faculty position in the hard sciences, then there's no reason for you to care about this stuff. I'm really just talking to those people who do want to get the best talent possible, of either gender, and telling them some of the reasons that other industries present better choices for some women.
Taking a year off of grad school because you got knocked up is the exact same thing, you can take it off and you can come back, but you come back either where you left off or retaking the classes that you did not complete before leave, every school in the nation already does this
A) It is NOT the exact same thing. When a woman has to withdraw from school for a whole semester or year to have a baby, she does not simply lose her income. She also usually loses her health insurance and her housing if she is in school housing. This is very different from taking a few weeks off for maternity leave.
B) Actually, many schools agree with me and are introducing better maternity leave programs for their graduate students. So no, not every school in the nation does this. I'm just saying that it's been a long time coming and that it's not everywhere yet.
I think you're still living in the 1950s and haven't been out of your house recently enough to realize that the world is slightly different now.
Oh, if only that were true. You might want to check out a book called The Mommy Wars if you really think that things are all that different. The great thing is, that it's not even a double-standard. It's a TRIPLE standard - stay at home moms get criticized for spoiling their kids or not providing a strong role model for their daughters! Everybody loses!
As for most of the rest of your post, you seem to somewhere have gotten the notion that I said that people should get paid maternity leave, which I never said. I'm just talking about plain old maternity leave, not being forced to withdraw for an entire semester or year like women have had to at many schools for many years. Sure, it's hard to take a 6-week leave when you're in classes, but once you're past that phase in a PhD program there's absolutely no reason that your leaves should only come in semester-long or year-long packages. And really no reason that you should lose your employment benefits during the leave.
Jesus christ you are one spoiled little girl. You don't get everything you want, I'm sorry thats just that way the world works. You get a great deal of choice in your life but you don't always get everything you want, you get to pick if you want a career at 30 or a child.
LOL. Seriously. Did you really just say that a woman has to choose between a career or a child? At any age? Really? For real? Which of us is stuck in the 1950s here? And obviously, choosing a career which involves graduate school that goes later than age 25 is "spoiled." You really expect me to take this kind of response seriously? Oh boy.
There is a ton of research showing that just putting technology into a classroom doesn't change much without a LOT of training. The teachers and the administrators both need long-term professional development on integrating technology into their curriculum to effect real change. Not just a one-day seminar - it needs to be ongoing over a period of years. It has to become an ingrained part of the culture of the classroom and the school. Otherwise, the computer is just something for kids to type up papers on and maybe do a little web research.
iTunes started selling DRM-free tracks from EMI several months before Amazon's store launched. Do you think Amazon MP3 could have been started in a world with no iTMS to soften the labels up toward the whole idea of digital downloads? And eMusic is all indies, they're playing a different game.
Now, I don't know why/how Amazon has managed to negotiate DRM-free deals with more of the big labels than Apple has, but I doubt it's because Apple just hates the idea of selling DRM-free music.
Why should the bar be lowered for you, but not me?
Yeahhhh... When you carry around a hungry parasite for nine months as it grows to the size of a watermelon, then push it out through a hole in your body that's normally an inch or so in diameter, all without needing a day off from work, THEN we'll talk about lowering bars, ok?
If your girlfriend were working at McDonald's, she'd sure as hell get a maternity leave. If she were a secretary sleeping with her boss behind your back, she'd get a maternity leave. Once she's a vet, she'll get a maternity leave. What magic law of nature says that because someone is in the phase of their career called "student," during which time they are working just as hard as they will later but getting paid far less for it - OR EVEN PAYING FOR IT - they shouldn't get the same considerations as someone who was a student a year ago? Especially in PhD programs, where the grad students aren't just taking classes - they're doing most of the grunt work that keeps the research program alive. They're employees. Their professors' careers would grind to a halt without them. They just happen to have the job title of "student."
Also, telling a woman to wait til after grad school to have kids is all nice and fine when she enters grad school at 22 and gets out just in time to take advantage of some prime baby-having years in her late 20s. What about women who enter grad school later? At 25 or 30? I'm sure your answer will be "Why were they so lazy before, it's not my fault they didn't get their act together" - but in some fields the experience gained in those years is considered valuable or even crucial.
As a last point, I am ALL FOR men getting time off to care for children just like women do. This is becoming a more common practice, and for those with "real jobs" is codified in law as required thanks to the FMLA. Grad student men, like grad student women, are SOL though. However, as I mentioned, if a male grad student takes no time off to care for his children, nobody would blink an eye. If a woman (grad student or otherwise) pops one out then returns to work the next week? She's lucky if the other moms in her neighborhood don't call CPS. I think that you are vastly underestimating the pressure put on a mother by her family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, random other mothers she walks by at the grocery store (oh hell, let's just call it "society") to put her children before her career, while her husband feels none of it.
When you get rid of THOSE double-standards, then we'll talk about getting rid of the horrible, nasty double-standard of letting a woman take time off for her body to recuperate from a traumatic event. I know it's holding you down, you poor thing.
As gamers age, they begin to seek out copies of games they played as kids. I know I have and I promise I'm not alone.
Can you imagine how much profit there is to be made if Nintendo released a $50 NES with $10 cartridges? Maybe put a few games per cartridge to sweeten the deal. All brand-new, unlike the used ones that are nearly unusable after 20 years. And not just the crap games, collections of those are everywhere. But Mario Bros 1-3, Zelda, Final Fantasy, the ones people have real nostalgia for. People would want it just for looks alone.
It's like that in a lot of science grad programs. The percent of women majoring in it in undergrad is decent. Then you see the percent gradually (or sometimes sharply) drop off over Master's, PhD, and university faculty. I think that one of the biggest reasons is that grad schools, and academia in general, haven't yet caught up with the fact that they are now serving people who need maternity leave and who want to balance their work and family life (and yes, more men today want to do this, too, but at least they don't get demonized if they put their career first). Combine that with the two-body problem in academia, and you get a lot of women who just throw up their hands and say screw it. I know I'm constantly having to convince myself not to, and I don't even have kids yet. (I'm not in CS, I'm not even in hard science - but even as a woman in a very family-friendly social science PhD program there are enough issues. I can't imagine how much harder it would be if the majority of my classmates weren't women who have had or are having kids during the program.)
Yeah, I was pretty surprised at that. I understand that there may be security risks, but it seems like the pros would outweigh the cons. And while Obama may be able to do his job without a blackberry or any email at all, with only a slight loss in efficiency, what about presidents 20, 30 years from now? I imagine that at some point there will come a time when such restrictions actually get in the way of the president's job in a meaningful way.
Hell yeah, Saturns! We have a 10-year-old SL1 that still gets 35+mpg highway and 25-30mpg in the city. Until a couple years ago it was still getting 40mpg highway. I don't understand why every freaking car made doesn't get this kind of mileage, if ten-year-old cars can get it.
You went to MIT and didn't know a single person who had serious psychological issues that were either triggered or exacerbated by being at MIT? Really? I call bullshit.
I loved MIT, I still love MIT, but the motto is IHTFP for a reason. Even people who love it, also hate it. People who don't love it? Or love it but can't handle it for some reason? Wind up at MacLean.
Slashdot Mirror
But the stupidity is in his expectation of cashing in on this, not in the trademark being issued, which is what people keep complaining about. It's probably just a publicity stunt, really.
Then why had they been warned previously by company inspectors to lower the temperature of the coffee?
Yeah, who'd ever think you could trademark a common word?
I'm so confused and amazed at the lack of understand of the difference between a patent, a copyright, and a trademark around these parts. Trademarking something does not mean that no one can ever use it again for any reason at all.
Probably the same kind of person who would think a common word like "apple" is trademarkable. Y'know, a totally normal person who is correct. It takes a special kind of idiot, though, to think that that means no one can ever, ever use the word/emoticon in any context again without paying them.
"Smart" is less precise than "high ability," which can be easily modified to talk about "high intellectual ability," "high creative ability," "high spatial ability," "high verbal ability," etc when needed. I'm not just talking about teacher referring to kids in their classes here, I'm talking about a field of research and development that needs operationalized terms.
Yeah, slashdot is all about damning research and relying on anecdotes. Any idea how many kids you've had over the years who were grade-skipped in the past but were so well-adjusted that you didn't even know it?
Thank you for your anecdote. Sadly, it does not cancel out decades of research. Here, I will give my own anecdote to cancel yours: My husband skipped the third grade, and not only did he suffer no ill effects from it at any point, his fourth grade teacher wanted to skip him to fifth because she didn't realize he'd already been skipped.
You see, they have devised these things called "statistics" so that we don't have to play dueling anecdotes all day. And the statistics from many, many studies show that the vast majority of grade-skipped children have no negative social or emotional effects from it. Most of those who do had problems before the skipping and the problems just weren't fixed by the skipping.
In psychological/educational terms, there is a difference between ability and achievement. Ability refers to things like IQ that measure "what you bring to the table," so to speak, and can only be developed to a limited extent. Achievement refers to things like grades and end-of-year test scores - someone with lower ability can work hard and achieve the same as someone with higher ability.
Unfortunately, we are saddled with the term "gifted" thanks to Louis Terman, who both created the Stanford-Binet IQ test and did the first large-scale longitudinal study of intelligence (which is still going on with the few remaining participants in their 80s and 90s). It was in that study that he classified people with an IQ of 140 or higher "gifted," and the terminology stuck. Personally, I can't stand it and try not to use it, in favor of the more straightforward and less loaded "high ability." But it will be a very long time before "gifted" goes anywhere.
BTW, that article is dead wrong with regards to grade-skipping. Over 50 years of research has shown that in most cases students who are skipped a grade have no negative social or emotional outcomes from it, and often it's positive socially. This research is summarized in the report A Nation Deceived.
I'm sure they'd absolutely LOVE to not sell a single thing to the millions of people who already own a DS or DS Lite, and ONLY sell this to the people who buy a system that won't even exist in the country these books are being sold in for months.
There's no reason they can't release this, AND do what you're suggesting once the DSi actually, y'know, exists. No reason to ignore possible profit now when it wouldn't interfere with profit later.
And then combine that with putting your games at a price people can afford/are willing to pay.
Clearly, even people who buy new games aren't actually willing/able to pay $50 for a game. They're only willing to pay $30 for a game - putting $50 up front then getting $20 back by reselling it. Then the used gamers snap it up for $35. If all those $50 games dropped their prices to $30, would the used gamers decide to buy the game a few weeks earlier for a lower price? Enough to make up for the price drop? And if that's combined with games that people don't want to resell within two weeks, it seems like you'd actually have a viable new game market.
Caffeine is certainly an iffy one, but I seriously doubt you're going to find studies that the internet is physically addicting. Or that either chocolate or sex is physically addicting for the majority of people.
Hell, cocaine is legal for medical use right now. They gave it to my sister when she was TWO to widen her nasal passages after she got a rock stuck up her nose.
That's right, marijuana is Schedule 1 but cocaine is only Schedule 2.
As for non-prescription use, I'm in favor of legalizing anything that's not physically addictive for the majority of the population. Things that are addictive, sure people should just not start if they want to stay healthy, but after a few uses they're not capable of making an informed decision. (Of course, that means nicotine is out, which I do think is how things should be but I know they never will be.) If it's not addictive, though, you're choosing it every time you do it, it's up to you.
Is Epstein-Barr a herpes virus? Because that is the only virus I have ever heard has had any link identified to Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
Ok, taking a bit of a step back from this, I realize that we are getting waaaayyyy off-topic with this whole argument.
My point was that there are fewer women the higher up the academic ladder you go in most hard sciences (apparently geology is an exception). Now, maybe you don't give a shit. That's fine. But there are people who do give a shit, who want the best and the brightest in their programs regardless of gender.
What I'm saying is, all this stuff we're arguing about is why women are not choosing that path. Like you said, everyone has to make choices in life. Definitely true. Women are choosing not to pursue PhDs and faculty positions in the hard sciences. Some of this may be lack of interest or ability, but I'm saying that there are other issues that are also influencing this choice.
A woman is given the opportunity to enter a PhD program. For many women, the thought process may go as follows: "Wow, the pay sucks. But we can afford it if we live in University housing. Oh, but if I decide to have a baby anytime in the next five years, we lose that housing. And my health insurance. Fuck that noise, I'm taking the high-paying industry job." She can have both a career and children, just not one that involves that PhD program. Maybe you don't give a shit if she goes into that PhD program, but I'm saying that for the people who do, this is part of her thought process.
The choices that academia has historically presented to women are much harsher ones than other industries. Maybe you think that's perfectly fair; after all, there are advantages to choosing academia. But academia can't both retain that system and continue to moan "Whyyyyyyy won't they choose meeeeee?" For many women, it has just made itself an unattractive choice because they cannot get some of the benefits that they can get in other industries.
Because people in academia do care that women aren't choosing it, they are slowly making changes. Many schools have significantly improved maternity leave for grad students in the past decade. They've introduced flexible tenure clocks. These things benefit both sexes, really, because men also have more opportunity to balance family and work; it's just that, historically, men have been pressured to prioritize work while women have been pressured to prioritize family, so when these kinds of family-friendly policies were not in place it was more likely to drive away women than men.
So yeah. You can bitch all you want about how women have to make choices. You're right, they do. And if you're 100% ok with that choice NOT being to pursue a PhD or faculty position in the hard sciences, then there's no reason for you to care about this stuff. I'm really just talking to those people who do want to get the best talent possible, of either gender, and telling them some of the reasons that other industries present better choices for some women.
Taking a year off of grad school because you got knocked up is the exact same thing, you can take it off and you can come back, but you come back either where you left off or retaking the classes that you did not complete before leave, every school in the nation already does this
A) It is NOT the exact same thing. When a woman has to withdraw from school for a whole semester or year to have a baby, she does not simply lose her income. She also usually loses her health insurance and her housing if she is in school housing. This is very different from taking a few weeks off for maternity leave.
B) Actually, many schools agree with me and are introducing better maternity leave programs for their graduate students. So no, not every school in the nation does this. I'm just saying that it's been a long time coming and that it's not everywhere yet.
I think you're still living in the 1950s and haven't been out of your house recently enough to realize that the world is slightly different now.
Oh, if only that were true. You might want to check out a book called The Mommy Wars if you really think that things are all that different. The great thing is, that it's not even a double-standard. It's a TRIPLE standard - stay at home moms get criticized for spoiling their kids or not providing a strong role model for their daughters! Everybody loses!
As for most of the rest of your post, you seem to somewhere have gotten the notion that I said that people should get paid maternity leave, which I never said. I'm just talking about plain old maternity leave, not being forced to withdraw for an entire semester or year like women have had to at many schools for many years. Sure, it's hard to take a 6-week leave when you're in classes, but once you're past that phase in a PhD program there's absolutely no reason that your leaves should only come in semester-long or year-long packages. And really no reason that you should lose your employment benefits during the leave.
Jesus christ you are one spoiled little girl. You don't get everything you want, I'm sorry thats just that way the world works. You get a great deal of choice in your life but you don't always get everything you want, you get to pick if you want a career at 30 or a child.
LOL. Seriously. Did you really just say that a woman has to choose between a career or a child? At any age? Really? For real? Which of us is stuck in the 1950s here? And obviously, choosing a career which involves graduate school that goes later than age 25 is "spoiled." You really expect me to take this kind of response seriously? Oh boy.
There is a ton of research showing that just putting technology into a classroom doesn't change much without a LOT of training. The teachers and the administrators both need long-term professional development on integrating technology into their curriculum to effect real change. Not just a one-day seminar - it needs to be ongoing over a period of years. It has to become an ingrained part of the culture of the classroom and the school. Otherwise, the computer is just something for kids to type up papers on and maybe do a little web research.
iTunes started selling DRM-free tracks from EMI several months before Amazon's store launched. Do you think Amazon MP3 could have been started in a world with no iTMS to soften the labels up toward the whole idea of digital downloads? And eMusic is all indies, they're playing a different game.
Now, I don't know why/how Amazon has managed to negotiate DRM-free deals with more of the big labels than Apple has, but I doubt it's because Apple just hates the idea of selling DRM-free music.
Why should the bar be lowered for you, but not me?
Yeahhhh... When you carry around a hungry parasite for nine months as it grows to the size of a watermelon, then push it out through a hole in your body that's normally an inch or so in diameter, all without needing a day off from work, THEN we'll talk about lowering bars, ok?
If your girlfriend were working at McDonald's, she'd sure as hell get a maternity leave. If she were a secretary sleeping with her boss behind your back, she'd get a maternity leave. Once she's a vet, she'll get a maternity leave. What magic law of nature says that because someone is in the phase of their career called "student," during which time they are working just as hard as they will later but getting paid far less for it - OR EVEN PAYING FOR IT - they shouldn't get the same considerations as someone who was a student a year ago? Especially in PhD programs, where the grad students aren't just taking classes - they're doing most of the grunt work that keeps the research program alive. They're employees. Their professors' careers would grind to a halt without them. They just happen to have the job title of "student."
Also, telling a woman to wait til after grad school to have kids is all nice and fine when she enters grad school at 22 and gets out just in time to take advantage of some prime baby-having years in her late 20s. What about women who enter grad school later? At 25 or 30? I'm sure your answer will be "Why were they so lazy before, it's not my fault they didn't get their act together" - but in some fields the experience gained in those years is considered valuable or even crucial.
As a last point, I am ALL FOR men getting time off to care for children just like women do. This is becoming a more common practice, and for those with "real jobs" is codified in law as required thanks to the FMLA. Grad student men, like grad student women, are SOL though. However, as I mentioned, if a male grad student takes no time off to care for his children, nobody would blink an eye. If a woman (grad student or otherwise) pops one out then returns to work the next week? She's lucky if the other moms in her neighborhood don't call CPS. I think that you are vastly underestimating the pressure put on a mother by her family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, random other mothers she walks by at the grocery store (oh hell, let's just call it "society") to put her children before her career, while her husband feels none of it.
When you get rid of THOSE double-standards, then we'll talk about getting rid of the horrible, nasty double-standard of letting a woman take time off for her body to recuperate from a traumatic event. I know it's holding you down, you poor thing.
P.S. Have you shown your girlfriend this post?
As gamers age, they begin to seek out copies of games they played as kids. I know I have and I promise I'm not alone.
Can you imagine how much profit there is to be made if Nintendo released a $50 NES with $10 cartridges? Maybe put a few games per cartridge to sweeten the deal. All brand-new, unlike the used ones that are nearly unusable after 20 years. And not just the crap games, collections of those are everywhere. But Mario Bros 1-3, Zelda, Final Fantasy, the ones people have real nostalgia for. People would want it just for looks alone.
It's like that in a lot of science grad programs. The percent of women majoring in it in undergrad is decent. Then you see the percent gradually (or sometimes sharply) drop off over Master's, PhD, and university faculty. I think that one of the biggest reasons is that grad schools, and academia in general, haven't yet caught up with the fact that they are now serving people who need maternity leave and who want to balance their work and family life (and yes, more men today want to do this, too, but at least they don't get demonized if they put their career first). Combine that with the two-body problem in academia, and you get a lot of women who just throw up their hands and say screw it. I know I'm constantly having to convince myself not to, and I don't even have kids yet. (I'm not in CS, I'm not even in hard science - but even as a woman in a very family-friendly social science PhD program there are enough issues. I can't imagine how much harder it would be if the majority of my classmates weren't women who have had or are having kids during the program.)
Yeah, I was pretty surprised at that. I understand that there may be security risks, but it seems like the pros would outweigh the cons. And while Obama may be able to do his job without a blackberry or any email at all, with only a slight loss in efficiency, what about presidents 20, 30 years from now? I imagine that at some point there will come a time when such restrictions actually get in the way of the president's job in a meaningful way.
I'm curious about your sig. Do you think senators should be elected by the state legislatures? If so, why?
Hell yeah, Saturns! We have a 10-year-old SL1 that still gets 35+mpg highway and 25-30mpg in the city. Until a couple years ago it was still getting 40mpg highway. I don't understand why every freaking car made doesn't get this kind of mileage, if ten-year-old cars can get it.
You went to MIT and didn't know a single person who had serious psychological issues that were either triggered or exacerbated by being at MIT? Really? I call bullshit.
I loved MIT, I still love MIT, but the motto is IHTFP for a reason. Even people who love it, also hate it. People who don't love it? Or love it but can't handle it for some reason? Wind up at MacLean.