Is keeping a 14 year-old kid from learning how to build an atomic bomb or learning the finer points of doing it doggy-style really censorship?
Nobody (that I saw) was complaining about 14 yr old kids not being able to view porn. They are complaining about laws that censor (among other things) the Bible, Wuthering Heights, and breast cancer information, in a feeble and completely ineffective attempt to stop the kids from looking at the porn. _That's_ the censorship. Not only the accidental censorship of non-porno material but the entirely-on-purpose censorship of sites not aligned with the small world of the guy who wrote the filter list. Intentionally stopping people viewing anti-censorship sites is censorship by any definition of the word.
> But you sometimes have to mix pointers and references for the simple reason that you can't re-assign references. In code, this might be no problem, but what about classes?
That's the one thing that I miss from Java - not being able to say
class Jobby{ public: MyObject& anObject;// a null reference Jobby(MyObject obj); }
Jobby::Jobby(MyObject obj){ anObject = obj; }
Perhaps being a Javaist makes me overly wary of pointers. But I _like_ references!! And I don't like that nasty -> thing!
>> I think that it's a much shorter learning curve to learn the C language fairly well than C++. I think this has helped in the Gnome project, although I'm sure there are people who feel differently.
> I suspect a lot depends on what you have learned before it - I found C easy to learn having already studied Basic, Cobol and Pascal - all procedural languages. Had I went from a base of OO language to C++, I would probably have regarded the C subset as a primitive reminant suitable only for things not worth wasting the full glory of objects on.....
I can confirm that... I came to C++ from Java. I did learn some BASIC first, but I've almost forgotten it. Nobody ever taught me what was good functional programming style. However, my degree course was based around Java and OO programming.
When faced with C++ I was able to make the conversion fairly painlessly: it wasn't the objects that were the problem, just the pointers! At this stage my C++ may or may not be a very good style example (I hope it is!) but I know it's better than anything I could hope to write in C after a similar learning time. I just don't know how to write functional programs. I'd be forever trying to write C++ in C, rather than getting on with learning C and writing that instead - just the mistake C programmers make when they learn C++. Only, there are plenty of trendy texts explaining OO style to C programmers, and a lot less explaining functional programming to OO programmers.
Also, from the little I've seen of female programmers, they do approach things differently...
As a female programmer: Yep. We do. This is good, and while I thoroughly agree that it would be patronising for someone to give me a job purely because I bring that different stuff to the task, nobody is going to be that stupid. It may well be in an employers interest to encourage women who _could_ do the job better than some of the male applicants, to consider training as programmers, because of this difference.
As to what it is that I bring: In my case I think the difference is taking a more holistic approach to the whole thing. I tend to be more interested in design patterns, assimilating different ways of doing things (Lisp, Prolog, Python, as well as the C++ I get paid for) in order to give me insight into high level concepts that are sometimes relevant to what I'm doing. Guys seem to be more into coding C and assembler in order to give them insight into the low level nasties of what they're doing. Since the high level stuff seems to be the future, and the low level stuff, while always relevant, is receding into the past, this could be quite an advantage..
Besides this, there is the fact that a lot of men will deal differently with women: perhaps they see us as less of a challenge to their abilities or something, but I think being female helps with avoiding arguments, coming to group decisions, and related stuff. It might be a bit like being a female bouncer. Men are much more reluctant to argue with women bouncers, and much much more reluctant to be violent with them.
Part of the reason is that unless a woman is particularly good it will just never occur to them to go into the field. I fully intended to be a psychologist for years until I noticed in a blinding flash of inspiration that I would make a rubbish psychologist and a much better programmer. Luckily I figured it out in time. It was also fairly lucky that I had the opportunity to find out that I was good at programming at all.
Some men, in contrast, will go into computing fields because they can't think of anything better to do. No woman would do that: she'd go and be a teacher. Thus the clueful women in computing aren't diluted by a barrage of other women for whom it was a sort of default choice.
It _looks_ like that, because the keyboard and mouse aren't responding, so you can't switch to a console, or bring down the dead X. Usually the box is running happily underneath. You can telnet in from somewhere else, kill X and there you go, all fixed. Or at least, that's what happens on mine.
It makes sense to me that the only use for PC's in the future will be programming the apps that sit on the little gadgets. I can't think of anything else that can't be better done by a job-specific gadget. What do people actually use PC's for?
1. Games. We have gadgets for that. 2. Playing DVDs, MP3s and so forth. We have gadgets that do that too, and they'll get lots better, soon. 3. Writing essays/letters/articles/reports. All you need for that is an email gadget with a good text editor and a big screen. Give it five years and they'll be here in plenty. 4. Running specific apps like the one the doctor uses in the surgery, the one his receptionist uses to make the appointments, and so on. All easier when run on a Gadget that talks to a Qube in the cupboard: then the doc can take it on call with him.
OK there's more out there, but the majority of non-coders with pc's at work or at home are doing stuff like this, and they can save a lot of space by using the appropriate gadget.
Besides which, I don't see a reason for people like my dad to spend 600-1000 pounds on a pc when all they really need is maybe 200 pounds worth of assorted gadgets. Which will be far easier to use, since the less you want to do with something, the simpler the UI can be.
Just imagine, your grandma sees your PC and goes "ugh, how complicated", but as soon as she gets home she emails her friend, orders her weekly shopping over the net and settles down to read the knitting newsgroup. Or something.
When I did Soft Eng courses as part of my CS degree, I was left feeling very strongly that I had learnt nothing at all. All the talk about waterfall models, spiral models, and object models had left me none the wiser about a sensible way to design a real live large project. At the time I concluded that the only way to learn SE was to watch it actually in progress. So, is this the case or is it that:
a) My lecturers were just uninspiring OR b) The current state of SE is such a mess that there is _nothing to teach_ apart from how to get it wrong like everyone else does. In twenty year's time my children will actually learn things from their SE courses. Which is what this book seems to be saying.
Did anyone feel that the stuff they learnt in Software Engineering courses actually helped them engineer software?
Yes, I agree that nasty things get said in online forums. Yes, I agree that it puts some people off participating. However, I am doubtful about whether their gender has much to do with it. Personally I never felt intimidated, or anything else: I look at the more unpleasant posts, and think "how silly" and get on with my life, irrespective of my extra X chromosome.
In fact, being online _removes_ the ExtraX factor which one has in real life, where the rude, psychotic or unpleasant people know who you are, and the physical differences between the genders become more relevant. If I meet a weirdo in a bar, I may take a taxi home rather than walking. If I meet a weirdo on Slashdot, I can ignore them completely.
Perhaps I am unusual - certainly as a programmer I am not a typical woman, and I would be really interested in anyone who _does_ feel that their gender affects their participation in online discussion forums like this. It would be nice to have some reliable data on the participation of women, whether they post, or lurk, more or less than men. They would have to be matched for their technical knowledge, since it seems quite likely that being less computer literate _would_ put you off posting for fear of looking like an idiot. Has anyone seen anything like this?
Another interesting thing would be to look at these sort of statistics for newsgroups on sewing or child-rearing or anywhere that one might expect women to have equal or better subject knowledge.
Did you check out the pay scales...? £24k per *annum*....
Christ.... No wonder the british empire is in the state it is.
I think that's about 40,000 USD. Is that a low wage over there then? Here it is really fairly reasonable. The average wage is about 15,000 UKP, I think, which is maybe 24,000 USD. I don't think the spies would complain too much.
They seem to be misspelling 'color' as 'colour' in SEVERAL places, as well as a few other words. That must be one of the clues, but I can't figure out what it means for the life of me.
I think it means that they are English. Over here that spelling is entirely correct. Probably not a clue;)
The device works by using global positioning satellites to pinpoint the vehicle's exact location.
A digital road map on board the vehicle then tells the car when it is exceeding the speed limit, allowing it to choke off the fuel supply if speed restrictions are breached
As far as I can see this is just a GPS thing exactly like the ones already sold in expensive cars, which give you directions to where you're going as you go there. It just has an added gizmo which car manufacturers have to add, to calculate your speed and limit it. It is the "digital road map on the car" that does the maths, not (necessarily) the satellite. I believe big cars in the uk already have non-GPS based speed limiters at 140 mph or so. The satellite can't spy on you any more than it can with your handheld GPS-up-a-hill.
Yes, I agree that forcing people to carry GPS is an invasion of privacy, and that forcing them to limit their speed can be dangerous. But the story as presented (and some of the comments) seem to be exaggerating this aspect of the story somewhat.
I learned in my HS AP American Government class that the media and various other institutions are not under the control of a secret cabal
Didn't you also learn in your history class that nothing in history class is true? It is what people think is true based on the evidence they can find. This evidence is usually horribly incomplete and biased. If you meet someone who _saw_ what happened, then they are probably talking some sense. Even then, a lot people in attendance at historical events have their own agendas, so who knows. If you meet someone who talked to someone who saw what happened, they will be talking less sense.
Your text book has taken these chunks of evidence and strung them together to support one point of view, exactly the same as you are supposed to do when you write essays. This does not mean it is true!! You are not supposed to be learning a lot of True Facts about History. You are learning the ability to find sources, analyse them, and invent plausible _theories_ about what happened. You are allowed to say "This is likely to be the case because this quote from a guy who saw it supports it". You are not allowed to say "This is the case because it is in my history book" !!
From what I gathered from the review (haven't seen the book) it seemed like they were saying that technology is changing the assumptions that morality is based on. The example being Thou Shalt Not Steal, based on an assumption that stealing deprives others of their possessions and is thus wrong. We have to consider whether or not the change in the validity of the assumption changes the validity of the rule.
I think it was incredibly brave of someone representing the C of E to put forward such a view: Christianity (a bit like American law) is built on old foundations, and it is easy to worry that everything we ever trusted to will fall in a heap if these foundations are found to be no longer sensible.
Well, our ancestors didn't have Mental Illness as a pretty (and stigmatising) label to stick on things. But they certainly had village idiots, and I bet they also had a large proportion of people who were depressed, chronically shy, phobic, or just occasionally a bit crazy.
As far as I can see, mental illness is what happens when the normal stuff that makes your mind unique happens to stop you from being able to cope with your life. We probably have higher expectations from our lives than they did. For example, 20th century people may expect a partner whom they love, and a great social life, neither of which I imagine were so widely available to our ancestors.
Thus a lot of the conditions which are now defined as Mental Illness were not necessarily always seen as a problem. If you like, you can see it like this:
Mental illness is not seen as a problem => There is nobody who is mentally ill, they are all just strange => So mental illness must not be a problem!
Mental illness is seen as a problem => 20% of people fall under our new definition of mental illness => Obviously modern people are more mentally ill... We have a problem!
Well, they are! Doesn't mean they're any different from their ancestors though.
Supposing you had a horrible inheritable disease, and you were given the chance to be sure that your children would not get it. Can you honestly say that you would not go for it? What if you had the choice between a child that might have low intelligence, get on badly at school, hate life and end up living drunk under a bridge, or a child that has a better chance of being happy, having genes for higher intelligence, less depression and less tendency towards alcoholism?
If you chose not to, and your child did end up under the bridge, could you forgive yourself?
It is not as clear cut as you are making out. The whole problem with this area is that there are no nice labels on all the possibilities, saying "Good" and "Bad", to help us figure it all out.
int one; int two; int three; ... int thirty; ... ... one = big_long_math_expression_with_1_in; two= same_big_long_expression_only_with_2_instead; ...
and on in the same vein for many pages. I don't remember what the code was meant to do, but it did it! I really really hope that the guy who wrote it knew about those nifty cut and paste things though.
There's another way of doing this: get a motorised gadget that will move the limb in question. Then get the disabled person to record "thinking about moving legs" or "thinking about blue cheese" or anything, and make this be the cue to move the gadget. Then they just need some training to learn to operate the gadget by thinking the key thoughts. The down side being you could then make them fall over by showing them blue cheese:(
What you say makes sense if you see HTML as a sort of page layout thing like a publishing package: which is an idea held all too often by those people with pages that say "only viewable by IE 4.7, at 800x600, without any colour preferences set, with images loading automatically and with a 3Mb plugin that you can get with this link". This sort of thing is hardly feasible to anyone!
HTML was originally meant as a content thing. So if you put a header tag in your page, a sighted person's browser _may_ choose to put this in a big font, and a blind person's browser will read it out like a title or something. The word "header" implies nothing about the layout, only the content.
Unless you have one of these singing dancing (really annoying) web pages, then it's easy to do a couple of things like ALT tags that make all your content (apart from video and important images like product shots) available to pretty much anyone.
At my old university they called the main cluster of (I think) SPARC's "unix". Thus causing much confusion among students, who now all think that unix is a text based email program for NT (the only use for the cluster is telnetting to it from NT boxes and using Elm) or seemingly just a synonym for email.
I'm not a Christian, or an atheist, but I think he's right. Atheism is believing that there is no god, agnosticism is believing that there might or might not be a god but you don't know.
Main Entry: atheism Pronunciation: 'A-thE-"i-z&m Function: noun Etymology: Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god Date: 1546 1 archaic : UNGODLINESS, WICKEDNESS 2 a : a disbelief in the existence of deity b : the doctrine that there is no deity
The main point against it was that it was a tax for having a head. No reductions for not having lots of money, unless you're actually getting unemployment benefit. So millionaires paid the same as single parents with part-time office jobs.
Yep. Get involved with activities where you are likely to meet women. Enjoy the company of the people there. If you get on with some of them (of either gender) then try and do stuff with them outside of wherever you met them. Talk to them, and get to know them. If you're anything like I was at your age, then the line is blurred between "dating" and just having a female friend that you hang round with.
Oh and bear in mind that if you (like a lot of guys) like younger women, they might not be up for anything more yet and might be revolted (or scared) at the idea of this happening with ANYONE, not just you.
And, females your age that you get on with (but don't want to date) are probably good sources of further advice, which will be more suited to you than that of Slashdot posters who don't know you.
The guys I know quickly learned that, just like anyone else, there is stuff I can teach them and stuff they can teach me. So they respect that and don't seem to have a problem asking me for help, or conversely, explaining things in a way I'll understand. Maybe I'm just lucky. I've had people sound patronising because I don't know something obvious, but never because I'm female.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody (that I saw) was complaining about 14 yr old kids not being able to view porn. They are complaining about laws that censor (among other things) the Bible, Wuthering Heights, and breast cancer information, in a feeble and completely ineffective attempt to stop the kids from looking at the porn. _That's_ the censorship. Not only the accidental censorship of non-porno material but the entirely-on-purpose censorship of sites not aligned with the small world of the guy who wrote the filter list. Intentionally stopping people viewing anti-censorship sites is censorship by any definition of the word.
> But you sometimes have to mix pointers and references for the simple reason that you can't re-assign references. In code, this might be no problem, but what about classes?
// a null reference
That's the one thing that I miss from Java - not being able to say
class Jobby{
public:
MyObject& anObject;
Jobby(MyObject obj);
}
Jobby::Jobby(MyObject obj){
anObject = obj;
}
Perhaps being a Javaist makes me overly wary of pointers. But I _like_ references!! And I don't like that nasty -> thing!
>> I think that it's a much shorter learning curve to learn the C language fairly well than C++. I think this has helped in the Gnome project, although I'm sure there are people who feel differently.
> I suspect a lot depends on what you have learned before it - I found C easy to learn having already studied Basic, Cobol and Pascal - all procedural languages. Had I went from a base of OO language to C++, I would probably have regarded the C subset as a primitive reminant suitable only for things not worth wasting the full glory of objects on.....
I can confirm that... I came to C++ from Java. I did learn some BASIC first, but I've almost forgotten it. Nobody ever taught me what was good functional programming style. However, my degree course was based around Java and OO programming.
When faced with C++ I was able to make the conversion fairly painlessly: it wasn't the objects that were the problem, just the pointers! At this stage my C++ may or may not be a very good style example (I hope it is!) but I know it's better than anything I could hope to write in C after a similar learning time. I just don't know how to write functional programs. I'd be forever trying to write C++ in C, rather than getting on with learning C and writing that instead - just the mistake C programmers make when they learn C++. Only, there are plenty of trendy texts explaining OO style to C programmers, and a lot less explaining functional programming to OO programmers.
As a female programmer: Yep. We do. This is good, and while I thoroughly agree that it would be patronising for someone to give me a job purely because I bring that different stuff to the task, nobody is going to be that stupid. It may well be in an employers interest to encourage women who _could_ do the job better than some of the male applicants, to consider training as programmers, because of this difference.
As to what it is that I bring: In my case I think the difference is taking a more holistic approach to the whole thing. I tend to be more interested in design patterns, assimilating different ways of doing things (Lisp, Prolog, Python, as well as the C++ I get paid for) in order to give me insight into high level concepts that are sometimes relevant to what I'm doing. Guys seem to be more into coding C and assembler in order to give them insight into the low level nasties of what they're doing. Since the high level stuff seems to be the future, and the low level stuff, while always relevant, is receding into the past, this could be quite an advantage..
Besides this, there is the fact that a lot of men will deal differently with women: perhaps they see us as less of a challenge to their abilities or something, but I think being female helps with avoiding arguments, coming to group decisions, and related stuff. It might be a bit like being a female bouncer. Men are much more reluctant to argue with women bouncers, and much much more reluctant to be violent with them.
Some men, in contrast, will go into computing fields because they can't think of anything better to do. No woman would do that: she'd go and be a teacher. Thus the clueful women in computing aren't diluted by a barrage of other women for whom it was a sort of default choice.
It _looks_ like that, because the keyboard and mouse aren't responding, so you can't switch to a console, or bring down the dead X. Usually the box is running happily underneath. You can telnet in from somewhere else, kill X and there you go, all fixed. Or at least, that's what happens on mine.
It makes sense to me that the only use for PC's in the future will be programming the apps that sit on the little gadgets. I can't think of anything else that can't be better done by a job-specific gadget. What do people actually use PC's for?
1. Games. We have gadgets for that.
2. Playing DVDs, MP3s and so forth. We have gadgets that do that too, and they'll get lots better, soon.
3. Writing essays/letters/articles/reports. All you need for that is an email gadget with a good text editor and a big screen. Give it five years and they'll be here in plenty.
4. Running specific apps like the one the doctor uses in the surgery, the one his receptionist uses to make the appointments, and so on. All easier when run on a Gadget that talks to a Qube in the cupboard: then the doc can take it on call with him.
OK there's more out there, but the majority of non-coders with pc's at work or at home are doing stuff like this, and they can save a lot of space by using the appropriate gadget.
Besides which, I don't see a reason for people like my dad to spend 600-1000 pounds on a pc when all they really need is maybe 200 pounds worth of assorted gadgets. Which will be far easier to use, since the less you want to do with something, the simpler the UI can be.
Just imagine, your grandma sees your PC and goes "ugh, how complicated", but as soon as she gets home she emails her friend, orders her weekly shopping over the net and settles down to read the knitting newsgroup. Or something.
Oh, and Windows can be entirely replaced by EPOC.
When I did Soft Eng courses as part of my CS degree, I was left feeling very strongly that I had learnt nothing at all. All the talk about waterfall models, spiral models, and object models had left me none the wiser about a sensible way to design a real live large project. At the time I concluded that the only way to learn SE was to watch it actually in progress. So, is this the case or is it that:
a) My lecturers were just uninspiring
OR
b) The current state of SE is such a mess that there is _nothing to teach_ apart from how to get it wrong like everyone else does. In twenty year's time my children will actually learn things from their SE courses. Which is what this book seems to be saying.
Did anyone feel that the stuff they learnt in Software Engineering courses actually helped them engineer software?
Yes, I agree that nasty things get said in online forums. Yes, I agree that it puts some people off participating. However, I am doubtful about whether their gender has much to do with it. Personally I never felt intimidated, or anything else: I look at the more unpleasant posts, and think "how silly" and get on with my life, irrespective of my extra X chromosome.
In fact, being online _removes_ the ExtraX factor which one has in real life, where the rude, psychotic or unpleasant people know who you are, and the physical differences between the genders become more relevant. If I meet a weirdo in a bar, I may take a taxi home rather than walking. If I meet a weirdo on Slashdot, I can ignore them completely.
Perhaps I am unusual - certainly as a programmer I am not a typical woman, and I would be really interested in anyone who _does_ feel that their gender affects their participation in online discussion forums like this. It would be nice to have some reliable data on the participation of women, whether they post, or lurk, more or less than men. They would have to be matched for their technical knowledge, since it seems quite likely that being less computer literate _would_ put you off posting for fear of looking like an idiot. Has anyone seen anything like this?
Another interesting thing would be to look at these sort of statistics for newsgroups on sewing or child-rearing or anywhere that one might expect women to have equal or better subject knowledge.
Christ.... No wonder the british empire is in the state it is.
I think that's about 40,000 USD. Is that a low wage over there then? Here it is really fairly reasonable. The average wage is about 15,000 UKP, I think, which is maybe 24,000 USD. I don't think the spies would complain too much.
I think it means that they are English. Over here that spelling is entirely correct. Probably not a clue ;)
A digital road map on board the vehicle then tells the car when it is exceeding the speed limit, allowing it to choke off the fuel supply if speed restrictions are breached
As far as I can see this is just a GPS thing exactly like the ones already sold in expensive cars, which give you directions to where you're going as you go there. It just has an added gizmo which car manufacturers have to add, to calculate your speed and limit it. It is the "digital road map on the car" that does the maths, not (necessarily) the satellite. I believe big cars in the uk already have non-GPS based speed limiters at 140 mph or so. The satellite can't spy on you any more than it can with your handheld GPS-up-a-hill.
Yes, I agree that forcing people to carry GPS is an invasion of privacy, and that forcing them to limit their speed can be dangerous. But the story as presented (and some of the comments) seem to be exaggerating this aspect of the story somewhat.
Didn't you also learn in your history class that nothing in history class is true? It is what people think is true based on the evidence they can find. This evidence is usually horribly incomplete and biased. If you meet someone who _saw_ what happened, then they are probably talking some sense. Even then, a lot people in attendance at historical events have their own agendas, so who knows. If you meet someone who talked to someone who saw what happened, they will be talking less sense.
Your text book has taken these chunks of evidence and strung them together to support one point of view, exactly the same as you are supposed to do when you write essays. This does not mean it is true!! You are not supposed to be learning a lot of True Facts about History. You are learning the ability to find sources, analyse them, and invent plausible _theories_ about what happened. You are allowed to say "This is likely to be the case because this quote from a guy who saw it supports it". You are not allowed to say "This is the case because it is in my history book" !!
I think it was incredibly brave of someone representing the C of E to put forward such a view: Christianity (a bit like American law) is built on old foundations, and it is easy to worry that everything we ever trusted to will fall in a heap if these foundations are found to be no longer sensible.
As far as I can see, mental illness is what happens when the normal stuff that makes your mind unique happens to stop you from being able to cope with your life. We probably have higher expectations from our lives than they did. For example, 20th century people may expect a partner whom they love, and a great social life, neither of which I imagine were so widely available to our ancestors.
Thus a lot of the conditions which are now defined as Mental Illness were not necessarily always seen as a problem. If you like, you can see it like this:
Mental illness is not seen as a problem
=> There is nobody who is mentally ill, they are all just strange
=> So mental illness must not be a problem!
Mental illness is seen as a problem
=> 20% of people fall under our new definition of mental illness
=> Obviously modern people are more mentally ill... We have a problem!
Well, they are! Doesn't mean they're any different from their ancestors though.
If you chose not to, and your child did end up under the bridge, could you forgive yourself?
It is not as clear cut as you are making out. The whole problem with this area is that there are no nice labels on all the possibilities, saying "Good" and "Bad", to help us figure it all out.
I saw some code once that went something like:
int one;
int two;
int three;
...
int thirty;
...
...
one = big_long_math_expression_with_1_in;
two= same_big_long_expression_only_with_2_instead;
...
and on in the same vein for many pages. I don't remember what the code was meant to do, but it did it! I really really hope that the guy who wrote it knew about those nifty cut and paste things though.
a) Mrs Jones is a government official, and has a nasty venereal disease. This information could be worth a lot of money.
b) Dodgy Insurance Company XYZ wants to collect data on everybody so they can make more informed decisions about who can have health insurance.
c) Mrs Jones has a headache from figuring out a valid key, and right now she is using it to prescribe methadone to all her friends!
There's another way of doing this: get a motorised gadget that will move the limb in question. Then get the disabled person to record "thinking about moving legs" or "thinking about blue cheese" or anything, and make this be the cue to move the gadget. Then they just need some training to learn to operate the gadget by thinking the key thoughts. The down side being you could then make them fall over by showing them blue cheese :(
HTML was originally meant as a content thing. So if you put a header tag in your page, a sighted person's browser _may_ choose to put this in a big font, and a blind person's browser will read it out like a title or something. The word "header" implies nothing about the layout, only the content.
Unless you have one of these singing dancing (really annoying) web pages, then it's easy to do a couple of things like ALT tags that make all your content (apart from video and important images like product shots) available to pretty much anyone.
At my old university they called the main cluster of (I think) SPARC's "unix". Thus causing much confusion among students, who now all think that unix is a text based email program for NT (the only use for the cluster is telnetting to it from NT boxes and using Elm) or seemingly just a synonym for email.
I'm not a Christian, or an atheist, but I think he's right. Atheism is believing that there is no god, agnosticism is believing that there might or might not be a god but you don't know.
Main Entry: atheism
Pronunciation: 'A-thE-"i-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
Date: 1546
1 archaic : UNGODLINESS, WICKEDNESS
2 a : a disbelief in the existence of deity b : the doctrine that there is no deity
from http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
The main point against it was that it was a tax for having a head. No reductions for not having lots of money, unless you're actually getting unemployment benefit. So millionaires paid the same as single parents with part-time office jobs.
Oh and bear in mind that if you (like a lot of guys) like younger women, they might not be up for anything more yet and might be revolted (or scared) at the idea of this happening with ANYONE, not just you.
And, females your age that you get on with (but don't want to date) are probably good sources of further advice, which will be more suited to you than that of Slashdot posters who don't know you.
The guys I know quickly learned that, just like anyone else, there is stuff I can teach them and stuff they can teach me. So they respect that and don't seem to have a problem asking me for help, or conversely, explaining things in a way I'll understand. Maybe I'm just lucky. I've had people sound patronising because I don't know something obvious, but never because I'm female.