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And I should be able to trademark the term "Clothing Store" for my store that sells clothing. App is a reasonable abbreviation for application, a standard product name. An "App store" sells apps.

Not so fast there, buddy!

Apparently, the Federal Circuits are DEEPLY divided on this particular subject.

I smell a SCOTUS case coming in 3... 2... 1..

Mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, NV, from the university of las vegas photo collection. Here's another that's actually a photograph instead of a heavily retouched/colorized picture. These are from November, 1951.

Mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, NV, from the university of las vegas photo collection. Here's another that's actually a photograph instead of a heavily retouched/colorized picture. These are from November, 1951.

Having unlimited cycles and memory creates its own problems. Brooks describes in the mythical man month how increasing the size of a software project introduces errors that slow down development. Having limited cycles forces code optimization, which is why many numerical tools used today are directly based on beautifully optimized fortran 77 routines written when number crunching power was precious.

It's a student project, and it shows. The article is superficial. The first two sources listed are Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. There's a page on the Simpsons. You get the general idea.

Considerable work has been done on gambling psychology, but they didn't find it. There's an online Journal of Gambling Issues, with papers like Slot machine structural characteristics: Distorted player views of payback percentages. There's an annual trade show, Global Gaming Expo, and even an institute of higher learning devoted to the subject, the International Gaming Institute, part of (inevitably) the University of Las Vegas.

Their "experimental work" consisted of playing "freeslots.com". They didn't even notice that the "free slots" programs are set to have an expectation greater than zero when played in free mode. In fact, it's quite difficult to lose at "freeslots".

Industry analysis of player psychology has gone way beyond the stuff mentioned in this student paper. The big breakthrough was when slot machines started accepting player affinity cards. Today's casinos have the player's entire history, at the per-click level, on file, and considerable effort goes into mining that data. Some studies have compared what players have thought they won versus the casino's history of their track record. Many players don't even know that they're losing, let alone how much.

If you want to read about this subject, start with Super Casino, an 1999 inside look at some major Las Vegas properties.

If copying isn't copyright controlled, you don't need any license to install.

And it is ONLY under the idea that you DO need a license for such a copy that an EULA can be considered required and legal.

Public universities would likely take him.

Some of them are really good, such as UCSD, or UNLV.

UNLV will let one take classes as a "special student" before admission, and you can get in if you do well enough. Despite the jokes and smart-ass comments people make about it, it is a premier university, and is THE leader in OCR technology development.

Public universities would likely take him.

Some of them are really good, such as UCSD, or UNLV.

UNLV will let one take classes as a "special student" before admission, and you can get in if you do well enough. Despite the jokes and smart-ass comments people make about it, it is a premier university, and is THE leader in OCR technology development.

Google didn't release it under the Apache License Version 2.0, HP did, through ISRI. There is also the additional license for the Aspirin/MIGRAINES system (see the Tesseract readme). This is probably because HP uses Apache code frequently in its products and is familiar and satisfied with the license.

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/an nouncing-tesseract-ocr.html

http://www.isri.unlv.edu/ISRI/Software#Experimenta l_Open_Source_OCR

Google would have had little choice in the matter.

I mostly agree with you, except that I think FORTRAN needs to stay in the curriculum, at least in a survey course. Unfortunately there are a lot of science departments that use FORTRAN exclusively, because older professors have decades of code and no motivation to learn a new language.

Math, too...I had to pick up enough FORTRAN to get by in a computational linear algebra course. That particular course (as opposed to the regular linear algebra course) was (and is) a degree requirement.

In ProCD, who is the contract between, exactly? Do you have links to those two cases?

ProCD didn't really explore who the contract was between, but it was between the software publisher and the user. The precise nature of the retailer's involvement wasn't an issue in the case, so it wasn't looked into.

ProCD is here and Klocek is here.

Except that you don't need permission to run the software from the publisher, because 17 USC 116 says you can anyway.

You mean section 117.

ProCD was interesting anyway, because it actually dealt with public domain information -- telephone numbers -- rather than copyrightable software per se.

Your objection is interesting, but AFAIK no one's actually made it in court.

http://www.zeh.unlv.edu/

http://www.betterhomebetterplanet.com/index.php?mo de=about

It sounds like the Blackberry's holster, which is typically worn on a belt and would be very difficult to remove (especially with the paunch present on so many of the executives that carry them), would be equipped with a proximity sensor, or at least would receive a message from the Blackberry, which is measuring its own proximity to the holster. The holster could then vibrate / play a sound / flash to indicate that the Blackberry is missing and, if the user doesn't find the device within a few minutes and type in a cancellation code, poof!!

Partial performance may fall under promissory estoppel

Yes, and promissory estoppel is a non-contract remedy.

Starting the work proposed by the offeror indicates acceptance of contract, and failure to complete would be breach of contract

Sometimes, in some jurisdictions. In others, beginning performance simply makes the offer irrevocable.

See http://www.law.unlv.edu/faculty/bam/k2000/r2k.html , specifically Restatement (Second) Section 32 -- Invitation of Promise or Performance.

This section is about offers which are ambiguous as to the method of acceptance. I do not think that either of my examples were ambiguous.

1. The Restatement is not law.
2. See also, Section 45 -- Option Contract Created by Part Performance or Tender
3. Have a look at the official comments to the referenced sections.
4. Google, "unilateral contract"

In most cases, such an offer invites acceptance by performance, and there is no acceptance until performance is complete.

Partial performance may fall under promissory estoppel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_estoppel#A merican_law

Starting the work proposed by the offeror indicates acceptance of contract, and failure to complete would be breach of contract, according to my business law textbook.

See http://www.law.unlv.edu/faculty/bam/k2000/r2k.html , specifically Restatement (Second) Section 32 -- Invitation of Promise or Performance.

Sorta, anyway. This is a link to the UNLV Solar Project, a project playing with new ideas in solar energy such as focus the light to a specific point (roughly, of course) to increase the uptake of energy by the receptors. I drive by these bad boys everyday. UNLV Solar

the dude (john lowry) that remastered citizen kane for dvd used an earlier version of the techniques used for the star wars set (it was the third film to use the technique whereas the SW set was well past the 70th film to receive treatment). he has since said in many interviews that he wishes he could do it over again as the earlier version of the technique he used made the movie too clean and removed too much film grain (giving it a slight video-like appearance). oh well, it's as good as we can get as the negative is long gone...

One of the funniest things I have seen on the internet is a video clip of some working stiff beating the snot out of his computer. You can see it at www.cs.unlv.edu/~acm/badday.mpg. Absolutely hilarious!

Thirdly, the difference between contracts and licenses is far more than their similarities.

In U.S. law, perhaps the definative definition of "contract" is that in the Restatement (Second) of Contracts, section 1:

A contract is a promise or a set of promises for the breach of which the law gives a remedy, or the performance fo which the law in some way recognizes as a duty

although some EULAs may think they are contracts or try and impose contractual obligations, there is no mutual agreement entered into between the parties beforehand, nothing that specifies payment made for good or services received or penalties under contract law. It's just a license - permission to do something which you otherwise would not be allowed to do.

UNLV

I'm in a building named for the guy. No its not inflatable, however, it IS the Physics building at my school.

Geez, and this is slashdot and no one mentioned Pepsi ripping off the guy who "won" the Harrier.

Pepsi offered the Harriet as a joke for 7 million Pepsi Points. Some guy bought $700,000 (US dollars) worth of points which is equal to 7 million in Pepsi currency. Pepsi told him to piss up a rope.

It went through court and the guy lost. Oh the humanity of it all.

I don't see how the language should matter in these sorts of exams. Personally I rather have the AP test be questions about algorithms, ideas and concepts. Something like:

1) Write PseudoCode for an AVL Tree
2) Describe the benefits of a hashtable

etc...

I never took this test (don't even know if it would've been available back in the late '80s), but I'd assume that it's designed to be a substitute for courses such as CSC 135. Data structures get brought up in the next couple of classes (136 and 269), so unless a year of AP computer science is supposed to be worth a year of introductory CS (you'd ordinarily take 135 & 136 alongside a bunch of general-requirements courses), I'm not so sure data structures would be something the AP test would cover. (I'm not saying that yours is a bad idea, but it might be outside the scope of what the course is trying to cover.)

We'll all be rich! Rich as Nazis!

Would this not have made good reading for the actors and actresses who give voice to the Simpsons?

The Area 51 talk is ok as long as it doesn't get too heavy into the black choppers that don't go whup, whup whup... in the night.

First, since he US Government controls vast areas of Nevada's innards, attributing any Sci/Tech weirdness in Nevada directly to Area 51 adds fuel to the disingenuousness which obfuscates rational UFO discussions.

As a near lifer Vegas resident who has been on extensive adventures in Nevada, I've seen many an unusual light in the sky which defied easy explanation, and several contrails in the air that were extraordinary, but it is wise to allow Occam's Razor to rule the day. Simply, the government tests new and secret projects extensively out in dem dere hills pardner. Get used to it, don't go overboard with alien absurdities.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

Friday's cloudy weather made Bill O'Donnell (M.S., UNLV, 1995. Electrical Engineering Electrical gizmo builder for the Physics Dept) doubt the theory of static interference...

"Solar flares can produce and eject large numbers of charge particles, and usually the Earth's magnetic field deflects them before they enter the atmosphere," said chemistry and physics Professor Malcolm Nicol (Visiting Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Executive Director, UNLV High Pressure Sciences and Engineering Center )..."But if they are very large, they have been known to destroy the electronics systems in satellites and cause other problems down here."

This sort of rules out known natural causes, but the dense cloud cover may have been reflecting electronic game playing up and over the intervening mountains and down into the Las Vegas valley.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

Paul Oei, an electronics engineer with the Los Angeles office of the FCC, said keyless entry systems operate on unlicensed frequencies. The devices can fail when they are near an antenna emitting high radio frequency energy...

he recalled hearing about an incident years ago in which garage-door openers stopped working in an area when Air Force One was nearby.

"Who knows what the military could be using at any given time?" he said.

Yes, who knows...but Mr. Bush's millstone in the War on Terrorism's hypocrisy as he stumbles into complexity, Pervez Musharraf, may have stymied an assasination attempt with a device similar to this.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org ...said military technology could easily be responsible for Friday's phenomenon. One such operation is jamming, which involves the release of electromagnetic energy to interfere with an enemy's radar detection capability...

Pike noted that particularly in Nevada, the military has a number of unacknowledged programs in jamming and radar and high-powered microwave weapons...

"The military is certainly capable of fibbing about these things," Pike said. "But, for the military to have done it, they would have to have seriously miscalculated the effects of some test."

Pike makes it sound like the chances of the government seriousl

The Area 51 talk is ok as long as it doesn't get too heavy into the black choppers that don't go whup, whup whup... in the night.

First, since he US Government controls vast areas of Nevada's innards, attributing any Sci/Tech weirdness in Nevada directly to Area 51 adds fuel to the disingenuousness which obfuscates rational UFO discussions.

As a near lifer Vegas resident who has been on extensive adventures in Nevada, I've seen many an unusual light in the sky which defied easy explanation, and several contrails in the air that were extraordinary, but it is wise to allow Occam's Razor to rule the day. Simply, the government tests new and secret projects extensively out in dem dere hills pardner. Get used to it, don't go overboard with alien absurdities.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

Friday's cloudy weather made Bill O'Donnell (M.S., UNLV, 1995. Electrical Engineering Electrical gizmo builder for the Physics Dept) doubt the theory of static interference...

"Solar flares can produce and eject large numbers of charge particles, and usually the Earth's magnetic field deflects them before they enter the atmosphere," said chemistry and physics Professor Malcolm Nicol (Visiting Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Executive Director, UNLV High Pressure Sciences and Engineering Center )..."But if they are very large, they have been known to destroy the electronics systems in satellites and cause other problems down here."

This sort of rules out known natural causes, but the dense cloud cover may have been reflecting electronic game playing up and over the intervening mountains and down into the Las Vegas valley.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

Paul Oei, an electronics engineer with the Los Angeles office of the FCC, said keyless entry systems operate on unlicensed frequencies. The devices can fail when they are near an antenna emitting high radio frequency energy...

he recalled hearing about an incident years ago in which garage-door openers stopped working in an area when Air Force One was nearby.

"Who knows what the military could be using at any given time?" he said.

Yes, who knows...but Mr. Bush's millstone in the War on Terrorism's hypocrisy as he stumbles into complexity, Pervez Musharraf, may have stymied an assasination attempt with a device similar to this.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org ...said military technology could easily be responsible for Friday's phenomenon. One such operation is jamming, which involves the release of electromagnetic energy to interfere with an enemy's radar detection capability...

Pike noted that particularly in Nevada, the military has a number of unacknowledged programs in jamming and radar and high-powered microwave weapons...

"The military is certainly capable of fibbing about these things," Pike said. "But, for the military to have done it, they would have to have seriously miscalculated the effects of some test."

Pike makes it sound like the chances of the government seriousl

The Area 51 talk is ok as long as it doesn't get too heavy into the black choppers that don't go whup, whup whup... in the night.

First, since he US Government controls vast areas of Nevada's innards, attributing any Sci/Tech weirdness in Nevada directly to Area 51 adds fuel to the disingenuousness which obfuscates rational UFO discussions.

As a near lifer Vegas resident who has been on extensive adventures in Nevada, I've seen many an unusual light in the sky which defied easy explanation, and several contrails in the air that were extraordinary, but it is wise to allow Occam's Razor to rule the day. Simply, the government tests new and secret projects extensively out in dem dere hills pardner. Get used to it, don't go overboard with alien absurdities.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

Friday's cloudy weather made Bill O'Donnell (M.S., UNLV, 1995. Electrical Engineering Electrical gizmo builder for the Physics Dept) doubt the theory of static interference...

"Solar flares can produce and eject large numbers of charge particles, and usually the Earth's magnetic field deflects them before they enter the atmosphere," said chemistry and physics Professor Malcolm Nicol (Visiting Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Executive Director, UNLV High Pressure Sciences and Engineering Center )..."But if they are very large, they have been known to destroy the electronics systems in satellites and cause other problems down here."

This sort of rules out known natural causes, but the dense cloud cover may have been reflecting electronic game playing up and over the intervening mountains and down into the Las Vegas valley.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

Paul Oei, an electronics engineer with the Los Angeles office of the FCC, said keyless entry systems operate on unlicensed frequencies. The devices can fail when they are near an antenna emitting high radio frequency energy...

he recalled hearing about an incident years ago in which garage-door openers stopped working in an area when Air Force One was nearby.

"Who knows what the military could be using at any given time?" he said.

Yes, who knows...but Mr. Bush's millstone in the War on Terrorism's hypocrisy as he stumbles into complexity, Pervez Musharraf, may have stymied an assasination attempt with a device similar to this.

from the RJ Article (hyperlinks added):

John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org ...said military technology could easily be responsible for Friday's phenomenon. One such operation is jamming, which involves the release of electromagnetic energy to interfere with an enemy's radar detection capability...

Pike noted that particularly in Nevada, the military has a number of unacknowledged programs in jamming and radar and high-powered microwave weapons...

"The military is certainly capable of fibbing about these things," Pike said. "But, for the military to have done it, they would have to have seriously miscalculated the effects of some test."

Pike makes it sound like the chances of the government seriousl

Well if learning is your goal, your local public college is the place. the library is typically open past 1am, and unless you want to take books with you, is free to non-students.

Some university libraries (such as this one) allow non-students to check out materials...typically under more restrictive terms (2 weeks at a time with only one or two consective renewals, vs. 3 weeks at a time and unlimited renewals), but you can't have everything. There's definitely much more useful material in there than in the public libraries, which seem to be more about fancy buildings, art displays, etc. than books these days. (And they wonder why citizens keep voting down tax increases and bond issues that would increase library funding...)

Some of the paintings are amazing

There --- you said it yourself -- Some

Taken as a whole, his body of work falls short of "genius". He knew how to draw and he could paint a picture -- but so do a lot of other people.

Maybe you could call him a "pop art genius" because that is what he succeeded at, self promotion. People with huge egos (such as he had) always have their disciples and defenders. But I'm not alone on this.

He was far more worried about the quality of attention he was getting rather than the quality of his work.

"Dogs Playing Poker" -- now there's genius ;-)

But then of course no Computer science courses above programing 1 uses windows machines.

Courses above the introductory level shouldn't care what you're running. Your code should run the same, no matter where you run it...toward the end, we had a mix of Linux, Win2K, NetBSD (which replaced SunOS on some ancient SPARCstation 1s), IRIX, and some other stuff I can't remember...it was usually recommended that you make sure your code would build on whatever the TA would use for testing, but properly-written code should build on anything. I usually did most of my coding/debugging on Linux on one of my machines and only did a quick compile/test on the grading machine to make sure I didn't do anything non-portable (which rarely happened). Hell, as late as 1997 I even ported one project (finding a knight's tour from a given starting position) from C to BASIC on an Apple II so that I could add graphics to it to plot the tour (not knowing at the time anything about graphics under X11 or Win32). I dumped a few of those to an Imagewriter and turned that in along with the C and BASIC programs.

One company, Energy Innovations, has an interesting new approach using a Stirling engine and solar mirrors.

UNLV has similar solar-power rigs at the far northern edge of campus. This page has more info, and some pictures...they're two different designs from different companies and can supply up to about 50 kW for the pair. Some solar A/C info and other stuff is further down the page as well.

This looks to be great for school. I'm currently attending UNLV and on any given day I'm probably lugging around something like 40-50 pounds of books and notebooks. Imagine being able to have all of your class notes in one little laptop, and then if they put the books on it too, like through Adobe's e-book reader or something, that'd be great. I'd love to do that instead of carrying around 1 and sometimes 2 bags.

Not only that, but you can just email your notes to your friends if they were um... hungover^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsick. I'd love this. I'm going to wait until at least the second generation of these devices, but I can tell you now that the next pc that I buy will be a tablet (most likely one styled after Toshiba's, I still want to be able to have a keyboard for the essentials, like Q3 or Unreal).

" If they succeed the SKA will be so big and precise it will jump the world's current best, the American Very Large Array in New Mexico, by a factor of 100, both in sensitivity and resolution."

Fortunately it's only compared to the VLA in regards of resolution. Single radiotelescopes have no chance in hell to get to extreme resolutions. Resolution is all in the diameter, or baseline. Nothing you can do about, it's just basic physics. Fortunately you can have big holes in your telescope, or inversely just a few parts of the surface. Excactly the principle of the VLA and VLBI in radio frequencies and the VLTI for light. You can even find a simulation applet here

In fact the earth itself is getting too small to get more resolution. Going into space is indeed being looked into, but not in the sense of a satellite like the Hubble orbiting the earth. That would hardly be worth the effort where radio astronomy is concerned. Having a baseline as long as the distance between the earth and the moon, now that would be an improvement. Plus, if it's built on the side that's always turned away from the earth, the telescope will be shielded from all the annoying interference created by all the radiochatter on earth, while it's still possible to look at the same piece of sky as an earth based telescope.

In the visual spectrum, Darwin from ESA looks set to become the next record holder . A first technology demonstration/development flight in the form of SMART-2 is currently under development.

sure, there's another project ('Chimera') to create a Mac OS X-friendly version of Mozilla

They need to change their name. Chimera is a web browser developed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. UNLV has a right to the name, they were first!

Yeah, I used Unix (not Linux) in programming courses when I was in college, but most colleges now-a-days use Win2K labs and are phasing out their Unix labs (same programming courses in my college are using Visual Studio's version of C++).

I was on the "twelve-year plan" going through college. :-) When I started, the CS lab was full of SPARCstation 1s with a smattering of NeXTcubes and PS/2s. By the time I finished up, the lab was running P!!! boxen (from Dell) that dual-booted Win2K and Linux. Most of the time, when you walked up to a random machine it was booted into Linux. (I'd reboot to Win2K because I can't stand Nutscrape and no other browser was installed under Linux. Besides, all my projects were on my Linux server at home and I could get at them via ssh.) There were also some SGI O2s in the engineering lab, and some older P5 boxen that dual-booted NT4 and NetBSD.

Nearly every course I took that involved programming revolved around Pascal, C, or C++ on something UN*Xish...the only courses that didn't were systems programming (x86 assembly under DOS and VAX assembly under VMS), database systems (nothing more than some simple SQL queries that were tested against Oracle, though you could use MySQL or even Access and still get correct results), and the two graphics courses I took. C++ under Win32 was recommended for those graphics courses, but all my image-processing projects (including a DCT-based image compressor and decompressor) were written in C as Linux command-line apps.

(FWIW, this was at a midsized public university. It'd be interesting to see any correlation between public/private, large/small, etc. institutions and what tends to get used at each.)

Even to some extent my College is going a bit too far. While my courses do involve theory we spend whole semester long classes on subjects like C++ or Java.... really should be 3 weeks at the most ...

Where I graduated, there are 100-level electives that you can take to pick up a specific language...looks like none are available this semester, but they've done some off-the-beaten path languages before. None are required, and they aren't prerequisites for anything.

The two introductory courses might take a nuts-and-bolts approach to a particular language. Once you get beyond those, the remaining courses use whatever's appropriate for the subject matter. Many of the upper-level courses are almost entirely theory-based, with little or no programming. (The only 400-level courses I took that involved programming were the two graphics courses (using C and/or C++ with calls to OpenGL) and compilers (using C++)). I ended up taking over twelve years to finish my degree; in that time, I ended up using Pascal, C, 8086 and VAX assembly, FORTRAN, and (in the last semester) C++.

(Someone starting today won't have to deal with Pascal, and I'm not sure what processor gets used in the systems-programming course now. The course where I used FORTRAN was actually a math course (computational linear algebra). That course especially was an exercise in picking up a language quickly enough to get the assignments done.)

check your sources (located as answers to the first question)

UNLV is an accredited university. As a senior there, I can attest that they have an excellent staff with excellent facilities who could give two poops about the basketball team.

Granted it is a small college, it is growing quickly and is well recognized for it's research for a university its size.

There are a number of skills I wish that I had acquired before I went out into the wider world. I would have liked a course on getting a job. It could have included:

• Resume writing
• Researching companies as potential employers
• Interviewing skills

There are a number of skills I wish that I had acquired before I went out into the wider world. I would have liked a course on getting a job. It could have included:

• Resume writing
• Researching companies as potential employers
• Interviewing skills

Whats worse is there is a building on the University of Nevada-Las Vegas campus named for this guy.

Robert L. Bigelow Physics Building #50 (ironic eh?). I had a class in there last semester too...

Whats worse is there is a building on the University of Nevada-Las Vegas campus named for this guy.

Robert L. Bigelow Physics Building #50 (ironic eh?). I had a class in there last semester too...

The fact that the gravitational force the sun exhibits on the moon is greater than the gravitational force the earth exhibits on the moon is irrelevant. The sun exerts a force on both the earth and moon and causes a (rougly) equal acceleration on the two bodies.

Tidal forces are a result of differences in gravitational forces from one side of a body to another. Since the sun is so far away these differences are much smaller than those the earth experiences from the moon, and those that the moon experiences from the earth. It isn't the strength of the gravitational field that matters, but rather the field gradient that is important. Because of the proximity of the earth to the moon, this gradient is much greater so the tidal forces of the earth on the moon and vice versa are much more pronounced.

Check out the following links.

From the astronomy department at the university of Arizona Check the bottom of the page.

From the physics and astronomy department at the University of Tenessee

From the physics department at UNLV. There is a good discussion here about why the tidal bulge leads the moon. It also touches on the effect of the solar tidal forces. It isn't to pull the moon away though, but instead to tidal lock to the sun.

You are correct about the length of the day during the dinosaurs, I don't know where I got that number, but loosing 10 hours in a few hundred million years does seem too rapid in hind site.

At EIVD, Switzerland, we use OSP for our Operating systems courses. But we're only on our second assignment and we're already running into a lot of dead ends because we don't have any documentation on it and can't find any on the web.

I'm not sure if it's still used, but when I took Operating Systems (CSC 370) at UNLV, OSP was the framework within which we wrote a memory manager and a process scheduler. As I recall, documentation for OSP was a thin staple-bound book in a dark blue cover; it couldn't have been much more than 50 or 60 pages. Since I took this course back in '92 or '93, it's definitely a fairly old product by now. I don't know if there ever would've been a website associated with it as almost nobody had heard of the Web or was using it in any serious way at the time.

You've got to be kidding me. Freedom. He ain't for freedom Charlie. In fact, he's the antithesis of freedom.

Hmm...last time I checked, Dubya wasn't out to gut the Constitution. Last time I checked, Dubya wasn't of the mindset to tell people the government knows better than they do what to do with their money. Last time I checked, Dubya doesn't intend to grab your guns, tell you what car to drive, etc.

On the other hand, when "Holy Joe" Lieberman visited town last week, he had some union thugs suspend the First Amendment at UNLV:

http://www.unlv.edu/ry/ne ws. html?stories/today/n4.html

Is this the caliber of individual you want in the White House, or in the line of succession?

I stand by my original assertion.

there are about a kajillion different ways to do the same thing

Nothing wrong with that as such (or perhaps I should say "per se"...)

and I've never much cared for the way variables are declared and used in Perl (scalars?). Too much use of symbols, not enough grammar.

Amen!

This is a plug for Icon. You can do everything you can in Perl in Icon - with sane and human-readable syntax. Things are slightly different there; see the article from the Linux Journal.

To download this object-oriented, very high level language with garbage collection, X11 support, POSIX stuff (networking, file/directory manipulation etc.) go to the Unicon web page. It is available for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD etc.) and Windows-NT. It is, of course, free.

-s

> stupid stuff with no evidence of design or consistency. (And I know what
> I'm talking about, I've had to write lots of VB code at work.)

> Strange, but I have written lots of VB code too yet my code is elegantly
> designed, consistant, and robust.

-s

VB is not a programming language. It is a cancerous agglutination of stupid stuff with no evidence of design or consistency. (And I know what I'm talking about, I've had to write lots of VB code at work.) Also, kids are smarter than you think. They're learning natural languages, a few funny characters like { and } doesn't faze them at all.

As far as the feared GOTO keyword, I never need to use it in VB

The goto is just a tool; use it where it makes sense. If you have three levels of nested blocks and you need to exit from the innermost, you shouldn't be writing code, son - go back to school and learn about design.

Really, only one thing needs to be said here: LOGO. It's freely available on all kinds of platforms, kids like it, and has very few stupid things about it. And UCB Logo is open source! Go look at http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/. On MS-Windows, MSW Logo.

If you really like procedural languages, have you considered Unicon, an extension of Icon that has integrated graphics, is object-oriented and has POSIX system calls? It even runs on NT! I've taught ten-year-olds to use it and they loved it. (Of course it runs under all kinds of Unix machines.)

-s