Slashdot Mirror

Oh, and as others have mentioned:

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - maybe hold off on this one for a while, but do read it
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/...

Software development can be a grind. Perspective is valuable.

Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming
http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.h...

Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line
http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/...

Vernor Vinge, True Names

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

before we suck the joy out of their lives with "inheritance encapsulation and polymorphism"

Why would you do such a vile thing to them that at any point in time? Why lead them astray to useless religions and superstitions like the ones you list when they should be actually honing their skills on general patterns of thinking?

Not a terrible idea. MIT has been working on the opposite idea (capturing heat in boxes to heat houses) for a long time:

https://www.technologyreview.c...
http://web.mit.edu/solardecath...

Obviously it hasn't been awesome yet (we're not all using that in our houses yet!)... but many smart people still think this idea has some legs...

Why would a farm need animals? How barbarian.

The future is computer-controlled, plant-based farming. Grow local, from anywhere.

Flywheels are great for short term energy storage for balancing high transient power usages. Some energy is lost over time due to imperfect bearings, so if you wanna store long term, the train might be a better option. Even batteries lose energy, but this train could conceivably store energy for ages.
The Alcator C-Mod power system uses a 120 ton alternator rotor which stores 500MJ at 1800RPM and an additional 75 ton flywheel which stores 1500MJ at 1800RPM.
https://www-internal.psfc.mit....

Does Common Lisp really have what could be labeled as sensible types? Recently I've been been leaning towards deductive systems, and novel models of computation, but even though I'm quite certain that CLOS+MOP are light-years ahead of anything else that can be currently used to structure hand-written code, making smart automated or semi-automated code processing systems to push us even further (algebraic simplifiers/optimizers, deductive/exploratory compilers and optimizers etc.) appears to be difficult in Common Lisp. (Even straight Scheme might need modifications for that, but there could be some tremendous benefits coming out of it.)

No. The optimum ration can be as low a 5:1 depending on the class, but there need to be more students than teachers.

The argument I know about is concerned with looking for methods of teaching as effective as one-to-one tutoring (but requiring fewer people). Admittedly, since the tutoring doesn't take every waking minute of the student's time, you might get away with more students than one per tutor, but 5:1 seems a stretch. At best you'd get different people for different subjects taught to the student. Learning-wise, why there need to be more students is unclear to me, aside from the obvious issue of cost.

My issue is that you really, really shouldn't be teaching someone to code without teching them general computer literacy.

"Computer literacy" usually means the ability to use a word processor, and a browser. That is NOT necessary to learn programming. 3rd and 4th graders can learn programming using Scratch without knowing any other applications. If by "computer literacy", you mean understanding how computers actually work, that is certainly not necessary. I have met very capable CS PhDs that don't know what a transistor is.

BI was tried in the past ... Mincome

A small Canadian town in the 1970s is in now way comparable to Los Angeles, New York City, New Orleans, or Detroit, and didn't have to deal with towns full of meth-heads.

Here's a paper that was presented earlier in this comment section as evidence that BI will work. Too bad he didn't read more than the the title.
http://economics.mit.edu/files/10849
However, despite this, policy-makers are often concerned about whether transfer programs of this type discourage work. And indeed, in developed country policy contexts, some transfer programs have indeed been shown to have small, but statistically significant, effects on work.

Yes, I see the words "some" and "small". Yet I also see that proponents ignore the circumstances in which BI programs are attempted (underdeveloped areas where the poor people aren't fat).

What do you predict will happen it something like a major change in humidity affects a region that has a nuclear arsenal and faces hostile neighbors? Keep in mind that's mainly just added moisture from a change in local weather patterns, something likely of typical changes in the future.

Its going to get really interesting when certain regions get temperatures over 38C and 100% humidity. And it becomes impossible to live without aircond; people outside airconditioning will just drop dead.

What do you predict will happen it something like a major change in humidity affects a region that has a nuclear arsenal and faces hostile neighbors? Keep in mind that's mainly just added moisture from a change in local weather patterns, something likely of typical changes in the future.

That is not a very original logo. The MIT Press has one just like it (same "font") and they have had it for decades. See http://mitpress.mit.edu/

For that matter, the machine would not be producing the drugs, it would just be packaging them. The drugs go in to the machine in some sort of loose form and the machine prints them into pills. Manufacturing is serious chemistry that would be hard to do in a fully automated manner in the field.

AFAICT, the machine would actually *produce* the drugs.

The chemical reactions required to synthesize each drug take place in the first of two modules. The reactions were designed so that they can take place at temperatures up to 250 degrees Celsius and pressures up to 17 atmospheres.
By swapping in different module components, the researchers can easily reconfigure the system to produce different drugs. “Within a few hours we could change from one compound to the other,” Jensen says.
In the second module, the crude drug solution is purified by crystallization, filtered, and dried to remove solvent, then dissolved or suspended in water as the final dosage form. The researchers also incorporated an ultrasound monitoring system that ensures the formulated drug solution is at the correct concentration.
http://news.mit.edu/2016/porta...

I read this before anyone told me about the miniature chips. Tinfoil hats don't do what THEY want you to think anyway.

Billboards are many meters wide and operate at 545 THz. Its pretty easy to get purely directional signals when you have such extreme scale differences (18 million : 1 ) between the "antenna" (10m) and the frequency (550nm). Your statement "without any interference" falls apart pretty quickly in most radio applications where the antenna size is often a fraction of the wavelength. Check out the plots in this online EE text: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ele... .

At this point, so much silt has been stirred, it's hard to know who's telling the truth, if anyone. If scientists want more credibility, they need to start flushing out the ideological charge embedded in universities where they study. Sure, Saud and Koch are hardly objective, but neither are the blowhards at the ivy league.

There is a lot of science out there to read. And trying to invalidate physics by casting aspersions on those who practice it is pretty disingenuous.

There really isn't much left to argue about, either greenhouse gases are greenhouse gases, or they aren't. With some 800 terawatts of radiative forcing in the atmosphere. (1.6 watts per square meter) since 1750, something happens somewhere.

Here's one report - http://news.mit.edu/2010/expla... - where is the blowhardism in it? It's about as simple as can be made. I see no political or monetary agenda. Do you?

what is more, the denialists tend to dreadfully underestimate the money for the research and the scientists salaries. That's a hilarious excuse.

But really, it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny. The basic physics is irrefutable, you can prove the energy retention characteristic of the chemical composition of an atmosphere in your basement. Grade school children do it all the time in school science fairs.

Really, all you are left with is proving that the effect doesn''t exist in large scale systems.

And the research for that is vanishingly small. Even one of the last gasp "refutations" of AGW is the measurements of air temperatures in the troposphere versus satellite discrepancies. Which have long since been brought into correlation, but are still being drug up as a strange sort of false dilemma by deniers.

which by the way, the troposphere is not the surface.

I've always challenged deniers to provide the cites for the refutation of AGW. So far, everything has been pretty easy to refute, either by later research, or sad to say, sometimes deliberate falsification.

And no, the kooks who say the world will end are almost certainly wrong - Something will be here until the sun goes red giant. But things will change. We have a sneak preview of it going on right now. The city of Miami in Florida is already undergoing flooding every spring tide at present levels. The water is there - that cannot be denied. You can walk in it on the street, and it's salt water. http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/H...

http://www.local10.com/news/lo...

These are not from storm surges, these are from a completely natural event. Just higher than it used to be.

And that's just one part of it.

So if you actually are interested in real research, with none of the blowhardism you hate, it's all out there. But the denialists are pretty much now relegated to the same part of humanity as creationists and it's brother Intelligent design, Vaxxers, moon landing conspiracists, and tobacco industry lawyers.

Does Ad Astra say how you make a nuclear reactor more lightweight and reliable than modern or even future solar panels? Frankly, I don't consider their stuff vital anymore. For smaller applications, it's eclipsed with magnetically shielded hall thrusters; for higher trust applications, there's the very viable solar thermal rocket concept, also applicable for delivering water from asteroids all over the inner solar system. Also, yes, the tugs are an idea for the distant future, but so are regular Mars trips, so there's that. But there's already been some interesting studies with regards to making Mars trips much more viable with conventional tech and some clever engineering.

Most US Federal funding sources require that articles about research they support be available for public access by 12 months after publication. The MIT libraries have a good summary of the various rules. This includes the biggest funding sources for biomedical research: NIH and DoD.

What seems puzzling about the current situation is that because of features unique to academic publishing (the need for researchers to publish to advance their careers, the sources of funding) there is a fairly straightforward way to pay for open access (at least from within academia).

Under the traditional system, university libraries pay publishers for access to journals. The libraries, in turn, get at least part of their money from "indirect cost" charges from research grants. For those not familiar with that term, it is like a tax that a university (or other research organization) levies on research grants to pay for things that are needed to do research, but not a direct line-item cost included in the grant. For example, the salaries of researchers and research supplies are direct costs. Access to the university library and use of the building that the research is conducted in (and its utilities and maintenance) are indirect costs. Equipment or centralized services (e.g. statistical consulting) may be direct or indirect costs depending on university and the specific grant. Typical indirect cost rates are about 50%, so that if an investigator gets a grant for $200,000 of direct costs, the granting institution will pay the university an additional $100,000 to cover indirect costs.

Another way to route the money would be for publishers to make journals open access, but charge researches to publish articles. Publishing costs would become a direct cost line item on research grants, but the indirect cost rate would decrease since libraries would no longer be paying for access. For the system as a whole, the ultimate origin (granting agencies) and terminus (publishers) of publication costs would remain the same. I suspect there would also be major changes in how the money was distributed between researchers and institutions. For example, one worry about an open access system is that although it would make it easier for less well funded laboratories (either in less prestigious institutions or headed by junior researchers) to do work, there would be a bigger barrier for them to publish because it would cost a lot more than it does now. It would also require more of a commitment from universities to support publication of research that is not funded by grants (e.g. a lot of clinical research).

So my conclusion is that although open access is a viable alternative, changing completely to that model would involve a lot of disruption and would inevitably create winners and losers (both academically and financially) compared to the current model. Resistance on the part of the potential losers and inertia are what is slowing down or holding back the switch.

The "retaining privacy" part of the posting's title only refers to the ability to prevent some websites to be listed. Everything else is public. From the FAQ:

• How much of my browsing data does Eyebrowse collect?

  Eyebrowse only collects data from the domains that you give it permission to collect. ...

• Is the data I put on my Eyebrowse feed public?

  Yes. ....

• Exactly what fields are collected with each visit?

  From every visit that is collected from Eyebrowse, we collect the time you entered the page and the time you leave the page. From the webpage, we store the url, [....] . Finally, the visit is associated with your Eyebrowse account. ...

They specifically warn that even an anonymous eyebrowse account can be potentially tracked back to a user by his browsing behaviour. It appears the title of the posting promises more than the mechanism keeps. No wonder for a webservice promising to get you in touch with like-minded (or -browsing) people.

But the cards can be skimmed, and they have been! Getting the PIN is extremely simple, so don't even count on that as security. So it's just a matter of intercepting the data going to the bank as a man-in-the-middle, replicating even temporarily a card, predicting the upcoming "random" number, and so forth.

I'm not saying chip and pin is worse than mag stripe, but they are not so completely secure as the marketing would have you believe. Don't trust the banks or others when they say the cards "cannot be read". They have the same sorts of vulnerabilities as ATM in many cases; relying on cheap manufacturers who don't follow best practices on security, over confidence of the security, assuming a PIN is private, or willingness to accept a certain level of loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://people.csail.mit.edu/r...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-...
http://krebsonsecurity.com/201...
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-b...
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

The robot dynamics are amazing. But the door and box detection are all dependent on pre marking door edges, interior zones, box sides, etc. so the real challenge is still/going to be SLAM ... ... and battery life.

the minute amount of extra energy won't really matter though, that's the point. The sea won't rise two feet in one day, and those "poor natives" on islands essentially at sea level were going to be under water anyway in 400 years if not the next 75. alarmist nonsense like the impossible scenarios Al Gore presented just hurt the cause of doing anything meaningful about pollution

Tell us - how much is that "minute amount of extra energy"? Whatever handy unit of measurements, and don't spare us the big words.

The best estimate for the current radiative forcing due to anthropogenic trace gasses, according to the IPCC AR4, is 1.6 Watts per square meter (with a range of uncertainty from 0.6 to 2.4). http://news.mit.edu/2010/expla...

Whether that is "tiny" or not depends on what you call "tiny".

That is 800 Terawatts of extra energy stored in the atmosphere.

At this point we are at around 1.8 watts per square meter of radiative forcing. Let's go with rounding and call it 1000 Terawatts.

Here's more recent data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/a...

That's pretty significant in my book.

the minute amount of extra energy won't really matter though, that's the point. The sea won't rise two feet in one day, and those "poor natives" on islands essentially at sea level were going to be under water anyway in 400 years if not the next 75. alarmist nonsense like the impossible scenarios Al Gore presented just hurt the cause of doing anything meaningful about pollution

Tell us - how much is that "minute amount of extra energy"? Whatever handy unit of measurements, and don't spare us the big words.

The best estimate for the current radiative forcing due to anthropogenic trace gasses, according to the IPCC AR4, is 1.6 Watts per square meter (with a range of uncertainty from 0.6 to 2.4). http://news.mit.edu/2010/expla...

Whether that is "tiny" or not depends on what you call "tiny". For comparison, the average solar insolation at the top of the Earth's atmosphere 340 Watts per square meter, so it's small compared to the solar radiative forcing. On the other hand, the Earth's surface area is half a quadrillion square meters, so if you want to call that "large", you can do that, too.

I'm fine with that too, but given that this isn't victimless there should be criminal prosecutions against individuals as well.

Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago.

Okay here is the source code for the Multic operating system published in 1970's over 40 years ago.

http://web.mit.edu/multics-his...

That "greater productive capacity" hasn't returned real returns to the overall economy. If it had, there wouldn't have been a need for a bail-out. Brand new houses that were torn down because they couldn't be sold can hardly be called productive. Houses that can't be dumped because the tax liens are more than their current worth (lots of Chicago, for example), didn't add anything to the country's productivity.

It's the same thing with the spiraling cost of higher education - it costs proportionally way more than it did at the turn of the century, for a product that is worth less in today's economy. This is sucking money from the current generation, money that can not be put into production of goods or other services.

And you haven't even addressed the fact that pre-industrial societies worked less, contrary to what you claimed.

It's you that doesn't understand the relationship between work, labor, productivity, and the role of debt in devaluing labor.

Citation please? beyond a few islanders that lived with abundant food surrounding them in regions with warm climates all year around I don't know of any that this is true for. In fact it used to be more common to work 365 days a year.

Here is a citation that contradicts your "common to work 365 days":

During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma...

Never heard of him before.
Story was a pretty good read though.
****This post contains spoilers****

I thought Manna was a bit on the extreme side on both outcomes.
In order of whaaa?

First 4GC, Inc. ok There are only 1 billion share in existence to start then the rest of Australia joined the company pop of au is only say 25 mil. While it mentioned kids throughout it did not mention how they were allocated a share of the resources of the company surprising as in the first part it mentioned they think the robots are putting contraceptives in the water so emphasis was placed on it but nothing was said it does mention that they still have a finite amount of resources implying a stable population would be needed less each person's share of resources shrink into nothing 1/1000th of an apple is a pretty small piece. Of course you have the same problem with the capitalist system If you have lots of people to employ wages are poor. but with a low population things work much better and wages are better because there is actually competition among employers to get the few people available. It was strange to see the article a few weeks ago about falling population. Kind of like the 1995 sliders episode Luck of the Draw.

Second the insane loss of privacy for safety like the 2004 movie The Final Cut or the episode The Entire History of You from the 2011 series Black Mirror. Interlocks between your brain and the rest of your body that aren't fully under your control and your memories can be used against you in court as can everyone else's, you are tracked everywhere you go for safety, If anyone happens to see you walking outside it is logged and indexed to keep track of who knows your route. It is important to note that in both outcomes society loses all privacy in favor of safety. The story stopped just short of re-educating people for thought crimes.

Third The story talks about job blacklisting In the US we currently have a legal system that can make you a felon for a variety of reasons some rather frivolous (seriously http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... ) which is shorter than saying you will likely never be able to get a job that pays more than minimum wage. I still don't understand the reason behind it if they didn't think they were rehabilitated why would they let them out? and not being able to get a job is awful on the recidivism rates. In the US we seem to have a large misunderstanding of what jails are for is it rehabilitation or punishment? We can't seem to decide and have ended up with a bastardised system that does neither well.

Fourth the guy has had a share in the company for years and he's just now being told about it yet they still have mail it was mentioned in chapter 7.

Fifth Manna should have encountered the same problems as MIT. http://static.zerorobotics.mit...

Sixth the second part seems similar to the 2009 movie Surrogates where a large part of the population chooses to not interact in person never leaving their house.

Seventh there is a open source system in place with robots capable of completely replacing the human work force and somehow the US doesn't have 100% unemployment. whaaaat?

Eighth the terrafoam buildings aren't that far from what we have today absent the ability to leave and being crime free. Most aren't guaranteed the basics of food water shelter under the the current system.

Ninth how do they pay for things when interacting with other countries?

Both sections read like a work of satire hopefully that's intended. As neither future looked very bright to me.

Here's the actual MIT article: http://news.mit.edu/2016/hack-proof-rfid-chips-0203. It does a good job of explaining the concept. A side channel attack involves analyzing the behavior of the device during encryption to determine its cryptographic key. It's not easy to carry out such an attack, but it's possible. Yes, using a different key each time eliminates the possibility of a side channel at the expense of a new vulnerability, which is the pseudo-random number generator. Perhaps the PRNG is good enough to be less of a vulnerability than a side channel attack, but this is a case of replacing one vulnerability with a different one.

I really can't see doing much heavy lifting with scratch...
https://scratch.mit.edu/
It does look like kids might have some fun with it.

Full disclosure: I've done some work for SpaceX.

Yes, you can learn a lot of robotics without actual hardware. I develop software for self-driving vehicles, and spend 95% of my time away from the hardware!

ROS + Gazebo will let you assemble a robotics software stack and explore different planning and control algorithms in simulation: http://gazebosim.org/ and http://www.ros.org/

If you want to explore perception and computer vision, take a look at OpenCV ( http://opencv.org/ ) and the tutorials there. The great thing about computer vision is you can run your software against the standard research sets or images you pull off Flickr.

Point Cloud Library is a nice package for looking at 3D laser data (but has some numerical quirks): http://pointclouds.org/

I would definitely take a look at some MOOCs, Andrew Ng's Machine Learning at Coursea (https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning) or the MIT Courseware ( http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ele... )

Regarding their goal, its in their charter:

[...]for the purpose of instituting and maintaining a society of arts, a museum of arts, and a school of industrial science, and aiding generally, by suitable means, the advancement, development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; with all the powers and privileges, and subject to all the duties, restrictions and liabilities, set forth in the sixty-eighth chapter of the General Statutes.

Rediscovering Things of Science: For many years [1940-1989], the Science Service produced a monthly series of science kits called "Things of Science", available by subscription. When I was a kid (in the 60s), I subscribed to Things of Science for several years. I suspect that many of us who chose careers in the sciences found at least part of our inspiration in those blue boxes that arrived in the mail every month (well, almost every month; sometimes we'd get manila envelopes, filled with stuff that wouldn't fit in the boxes). Each kit ("unit") had a booklet of experiments, and usually everything needed to perform them.

I think it's more about the potential of the blockchain rather than actual use today. The idea that you can have a publicly available trusted ledger without trusting anyone has a lot of potential uses and there are a lot of people developing different applications.
Here's a few more articles from MIT:
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
This MIT syllabus gives some idea of the potential:
http://blockchain.media.mit.ed...

They have a cyber security course going on now which you may be interested in. https://mitprofessionalx.mit.e...

Guy with profit motive thinks his pricey programming environment is better than one that is free.

He also doesn't understand how Scratch is used. I help teach programming to 4th graders in an after school program, using Scratch. The kids go to the site, and start programming. With Wolfram's site, they can't do that, because they hit an immediate roadblock: An email address is required. Most 9 year old kids don't have an email address, and don't know how to get one.

I was unable to create an account, because it seems to be Slashdotted, but from looking at the demos, it seems to require a lot of typing, rather than the graphical interface that Scratch uses. So my impression is that this is something that is too hard for young kids, but too silly for adults. In my school district, after the kids learn Scratch, they move up to a "real" programming language (Python) in middle school, so I am not sure if this product has a niche.

Guy with profit motive thinks his pricey programming environment is better than one that is free.

Hopefully this course includes a section on security. Doesn't look like it will, as a professional course, it looks more aimed at business people.

In fact,if they made the course entirely about security, the world would be better off.

I would like ./ editors to stop with "future Russian plans" stories, 'cause I can almost give you a warranty that given the today's economical situation in Russia, and given the fact that it's on the verge of collapse next to nothing will pan out in the nearest 20 to 50 years.

I think it is way to early to write Russia off: Russia is big and has most if not all of the raw materials needed for all the important industries, the ties to China are also becoming stronger, and 20 to 50 years is a very long time.

It would have been better if you'd run a story about the Russian ruble. It's dying. [...]

A low value of a national currency makes imports for this country expensive and exports cheaper for buyers, which means a low valued currency is good for export oriented countries. Russia is an export economy. Considering that Russia mostly exports raw materials, and imports goods like cars, computers etc. such the push from the falling value of the Ruble may actually be good for its industry, because it makes these industries more competitive compared to imported goods (e.g. as imported cars become more expensive cars produced in Russia may become more interesting to Russian buyers).

If you call programming creating Wordpress sites, then fine, everyone can code.

Otherwise, programming is little more than an IQ test. That means only the top x% have any hope when they start to learn to code of ever being any good at it. I fully support using the Purple Book ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) for intro to CS. If you can finish it, you rock. You are welcome to keep going. Otherwise: Be happy. You failed fast. Your calling is elsewhere.

One could argue that there always is a javascript capable browser available these days

One could also argue that these browsers can connect to the Internet, where there are many, many programming environments available. My kids started with Scratch. They are now learning Javascript using the Khan Academy sandbox. Basic is a horrible first language. Microsoft did the world a favor by removing it. But Satya Nadella had nothing to do with that either way.

In all these debates I'm always amazed how the simple "big picture" of the economics involved is disregarded. . .

The nature of some technologies result in centralized and monopolistic markets. In contrast, some technologies are conducive to decentralized and competitive markets. In the end, commoditization wins through rapid advancements and by pricing everything else out of the market. For instance, look at all the centralized land phone lines NOT being installed in Africa, yet phone usage is booming.

I know /.ers likes to fantasize a world not run by businessmen, and that is fine as long you realize that is just a fantasy. The current world is driven by business and the economic environment that shapes business decisions (though, this may not apply to the basement dwellers that frequent this site . . .).

Whose idea was to choose an interpreted language for the extremely slow 8-bit home computers?

Because fitting a compiler into the tight memory constraints was next to impossible. The BASIC ROM on the C64 was 8 kB; per Wikipedia, this is what forced Commodore to revert to v2.0 BASIC, which lacked even disk directory listing commands (remember LOAD "$", 8 and how it would clobber whatever you had in memory?).

Applesoft BASIC, which had these features, used 10k of ROM by comparison. Apple's earlier Integer BASIC was about the same size, but gave up floating-point support.

BASIC made it easy for beginners (like myself) to get something working. If Commodore had only included an assembler, for example, this would have been too steep of a learning curve for most folks and they would likely have bought something else that did have an interpreter. That said, anyone writing "real" programs wrote them in assembly; you had to resort to extreme tricks to get decent graphics on these systems. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Racing the Beam , which documents all the trickery that programmers for the Atari 2600 (which had weirder hardware but still was 65xx-based) had to resort to in order to make even halfway decent games.

I think the word devastating is quite apt. Air pollution from road transportation causes early death of some 53000/yr in US [1]. Diesel pollution probably supplies some disproportionate contribution.

1. http://news.mit.edu/2013/study...

Bored, huh?
I've been reading this guy off and on over the last few months. It's from around AD 120, who knows for sure.
https://archive.org/stream/mor...
Elizabeth Carter did the translation in 1758; they had a fondness for long sentences with many commas back then.
The Rufus he often refers to was Epictetus's teacher.

In this one, I like #25 - it gave me a different (more tolerable) view of butt-kissers, and this is from Hadrian's time.
http://classics.mit.edu/Epicte...

What makes a reason obvious and what makes it arbitrary?

Read Plato's Symposium again, the part where Pausanias insists that only tyrannical regimes are opposed to pederasty, because pederasty builds the kinds of connections between men that foster democracy. To an Athenian, it was obvious that pederasty was fine and dandy, and depictions of sex with children were all over Athenian vases. To us, today, pederasty is abhorrent and "child pr0n" is "banned by law for obvious reasons."

In Saudi Arabia, it might be obvious that depictions of Mohammed need to be banned. In the Netherlands, perhaps that is not obvious at all.

Censorship is always arbitrary, because human customs are arbitrary.

Do you recall the SCIgen vs. spamference debacle?

They have some idea what the clouds consist of, based on how they reflect/filter their sun's light. It's silicates and other minerals, not water. The point is if such a cloudy planet has water oceans, we would still not see the water signature because the clouds are in the way.