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User: MontyApollo

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  1. Brain Scans ( and Objects) on New Study Concludes Math Gender Gap Is Cultural, Not Biological · · Score: 1

    I also believe brain scan studies (MRI I think) showed male and female brains working differently when confronted with different kinds of problems, like math. Researches were looking at diagnosing something else completely but found by accident that they could differentiate between male and female based upon their brain scans.

    It has also seemed in some ways like math might be easier for guys (not necessarily better at it) because males tend think more in terms of objects than females do – they like toys and gadgets, they watch porn and objectify women, etc

  2. Re:Read a book on McCain Decries "Hobbits," Accused of Ringbearing · · Score: 1

    Well, if you RTFA, you would have saw the context of the WSJ article was the hobbits that were heroes and won the war...Really kid, READ TFA. Just once, it won't bite...it was not some great anthropological study of hobbits...it was a sarcastic remark about the Tea Party appearing to be stuck in a fantasy world...

  3. Re:Obviously McCain doesn't understand the story on McCain Decries "Hobbits," Accused of Ringbearing · · Score: 2

    According to the WSJ, their view in this instance seems to be that if they shut-down government and cause the US to go into default, that somehow everyone in the country will place all of the blame upon Obama while seeing the Tea Party as heroes, and that this miracle of somehow the general public placing all the blame on Obama will be outweigh the damages in the long run caused by the default and lowering of the US's ratings because the Tea Party would then have free reign to enact all the financial policies of their wet dreams and the Democrats would have no power to stop them (even if they do control the White House and the Senate...because the Tea Party would be heroes to most of the population...).

  4. Re:Typical politician on McCain Decries "Hobbits," Accused of Ringbearing · · Score: 1

    It was sarcasm...

  5. Re:Obviously McCain doesn't understand the story on McCain Decries "Hobbits," Accused of Ringbearing · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think claim is that while the Tea Party see themselves as hobbits, the reality of modern politics and finance does not lend itself to fairy tale endings no matter how much the "hobbits" believe their righteous cause and unwillingness to compromise will prove themselves reluctant heroes. The Wall Street Journal was in fact claiming that they were clueless to reality and will greatly harm the Tea Party and Republican cause.

  6. Re:Obviously McCain doesn't understand the story on McCain Decries "Hobbits," Accused of Ringbearing · · Score: 4, Informative

    It was a sarcastic remark - he was quoting the Wall Street Journal who was saying that the Tea Party rather simplistically see themselves as being heroic good little hobbits out to vanquish the obviously evil Mordor without regard to reality. Basically, the Wall Street Journal was saying the Tea Party worldview was rather fucked up, and McCain was emphasizing this.

  7. Re:Misleading Article on Microsoft Bans Open Source From the Windows Market · · Score: 1

    So has the "ire of the open source community" been raised (prior to this submission), or was that a lie too?

  8. Re:Early Development on College Students Lack Scientific Literacy · · Score: 1

    Bachelor level science degrees often don't lead to high paying jobs. One reason more don't become teachers is that standing in front of a room of bored kids just doesn't sound that appealing. I have worked with science majors for over twenty years, and the reason they don't become teachers has nothing to do with pay.

    (When people talk about "high paying" math and science, they usually mean engineering.)

  9. Re:Electricity usage monitoring on Smart Grid Brings Powerline Broadband Back? · · Score: 1

    I wondered what ever happened to the idea floating around about wiring all the meters. I guess this zigbee thing took over.

    (Years and years ago there was the idea that the power company could save money in the long run on human meter-readers by running a wire to every meter for smart metering, and there was talk that that they could run a broadband wire for about the same cost as any other wire. The argument was that not only would they save money in the long run, they would also be able to generate extra income by selling broadband service to any home they wired.)

  10. Re:Censorship on Groklaw — Don't Go Home, Go Big · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What does PJ's rights and personal freedom have anything to do with the judgment that the "site has limited value"? Maybe some people value sites more that don't censor comments.

  11. Re:Screw "SyFi" or whatever they call themselves. on BSG Prequel Series Caprica Canceled · · Score: 1

    Well to be fair, Universal did try to run a couple of episodes of BSG on NBC and see if it could gain traction off of cable. Even if they have no clue how to do it, they did try to give it a shot. It definitely could have been promoted better before the attempt though.

    SyFy seems to just keep going down hill though. There used to be several series I would watch. I had alot of doubts about Caprica, but it turned out to be decent. I'm still hanging on to the new Stargate series mainly because there is so little sci-fi left to watch.

  12. Re:yikes on NASA Reveals Hundred Year Starship Program · · Score: 1

    It would be a great accomplishment to go to Mars, but that is all it would be - just a feather in our cap. The talk of colonizing is just spin to gloss over the fact that the when we to the Moon just for the accomplishment of it, that the space program kind of went into the toilet afterward.

    A serious space program, if it were truly interested in colonization, would focus on the moon. The moon comes first if space colonization is really a goal. The moon comes first for mining and commerce.

    There is no reason to skip to Mars except that it would be a bigger accomplishment, but everybody gets bored once you achieve a great accomplishment and the funding disappears.

  13. Re:Double-edged sword on Why Intel Wants To Network Your Clothes Dryer · · Score: 2

    This idea of appliances calling in for their own repairs has been somebody's wet dream for a long time, and they even made a TV commercial showing supposedly how it would be a good thing for a repairman showing up at the door unannounced. That's not what I want, and I don't see why this idea has such legs.

    It would be maybe interesting if the appliance could send just me a report, then I could shop it around for estimates, but having it automatically contact somebody without going through me first is unappealing.

  14. Re:Total BS on Employee Monitoring · · Score: 1

    I agree with most of your post (and maybe it is just because I don't care for solitaire), but I do have a pet peeve with solitaire. I find it annoying when I run across employees who have almost full internet access (gambling filtered and probably porn) sitting there playing solitaire.

    It just seems like you could be doing something more interesting or productive for your personal life (e.g. reading a blog that you would otherwise spend your free time at home reading, reading the news, paying bills, etc...)

    Maybe I just feel that I have a shortage of time to do stuff that I like to do, so if I am going to steal some extra time from work I want it to be worthwhile or enjoyable. I play games at home, but not solitaire.

  15. Re:He Won! on The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It was a silly scheme, but from what I have read this is business as usual in SC politics. Republican operatives sometimes pay entry fees for black candidates just to "stir the pot" of racial division among the Democrats during the primaries so that blacks will be less likely to vote in the general election.

    I have also read that this is often not much more than a practical joke, especially in this case when the candidate did nothing but pay the entry fee and did not even have campaign signs up in his own yard. I think the Republicans really don't want these candidates to win because it would bring national attention to the way SC politics work, and they were probably just as shocked that Greene won as everybody else was.

  16. Re:Straight Science vs. Engineering on The Real Science Gap · · Score: 1

    It was good advice. Most people with just a bachelors degree in physics go into IT, engineering support, or finance. An engineer could do any of these fields just as good as a physics major, and of course they would get paid way more for engineering.

    Even if you seriously planned on going to grad school, it would still be a good idea to take some engineering classes as back-up. One of my physics "professors" was teaching the class for free so he could boost his resume and hopefully one day get a real physics job. He said every physics position he applied for had at least 100 other PhD applicants. His day-job was as a software engineer for a courier company. That was as close to physics he could get.

  17. Re:Who clicks on ads?! on Google Slams Apple Over iPhone Ad Ban · · Score: 1

    I don't think Google would have billions of dollars if there weren't a few people who click the ads.

  18. Re:Spelling is for the bees on Why Are Indian Kids So Good At Spelling? · · Score: 1

    After hearing some of the expert commentary during the competition, it does seem a lot more interesting than what I originally thought it would be. From what little I have seen, it looks like it is just as heavy linguistics as it is immaculate spelling. They use the meaning and origin of the word to figure out the likely way that individual parts of the word should be translated and spelled. It just seems like you would learn a lot about language in general and the different languages of the world.

  19. Re:the taste? on The Rise of Nanofoods · · Score: 1

    I believe the really good McDonald's french fries used to be cooked in tallow (beef fat), and they were later pressured into using trans-fats because at one point some thought it was healthier.

    As far as education, maybe we can educate people that animal fat isn't bad or a heart attack on a plate. Humans have eaten animal fat for about 2 million years. We only started eating processed omega-6 vegetable oils and margarine in the last 100 years or so (guess what century heart attacks became an epidemic).

    I do question artificial foods like nanofoods that are supposed to make us healthier (like the trans-fats were supposed to) because eating unnatural foods usually come with problems.

  20. Re:It doesn't come soon enough on Atlantis Blasts Off On Final Mission · · Score: 1

    I know you have an anti-Obama slant, but you forgot to mention paying for a long, pointless war in Iraq.

    I thought that I heard that Obama was increasing funding for NASA, just cutting manned space flight for awhile until we figure out how to do it right.

  21. Re:Cool. on Lidar Finds Overgrown Maya Pyramids · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have problem with people making statements about how the pyramids could not be built with the technology available. So called crop circle experts said there was no way humans could be behind crop circles, until they were shown video of two retired guys and a wood plank in fact doing it. People used to talk about how it was scientifically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, but yet it does.

    I think some people think too highly of their ability to figure things out, and they don't give other people enough credit for their ingenuity.

  22. Re:Cool. on Lidar Finds Overgrown Maya Pyramids · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I had a professor once that pretty effectively argued that Crete was Atlantis. I have forgot most of the arguments, but I believe one of them was that if you assumed a common translation error in numbers that Plato might have committed, then the eruption of Thera would coincide very well with the (corrected) time period of Atlantis's fall.

  23. Re:Wow, that's pretty ignorant on What Chernobyl Looks Like In 2010 · · Score: 1

    American and British intelligence had already reached the conclusion that Japan would surrender the moment that Russia declared war on them, which is what happened; Japan surrendered as soon as Russia entered the war. The atomic bombings did not even provoke a meeting of Japan's war council. We were fire-bombing their cities at will anyway at that point.

  24. Re:Networks and proxies and firewalls oh my on NJ Court Upholds Privacy of Personal Emails At Work · · Score: 2, Insightful

    From reading the article, it looks like it has nothing to do with networks and proxies and firewalls (oh my). They scanned her hard-drive and probably found them in the browser cache. Since it was a laptop, it entirely possible, if not likely, that she emailed her attorneys from home using her own network.

  25. Re:Waste of time. on How Do You Get Users To Read Error Messages? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The "one-click send me the info option" is definitely the best solution.

    What is annoying is that in many Windows programs (at least Office 97) you can't even copy and paste the error message text. Your only option is to do a screen capture of the window.