Hmmm.... that's odd.... the Cylons must have managed to just miss all of Picon's wireless access points with their barrage of nukes. Or maybe it was just part of their "plan" all along?
Poll a few hundred English lit professors about which one novel you should start with to get a kid into the classics and you are going to get a few hundred very different and extremely opinionated answers. Put them all in the same room, and you'll get a lot of interesting arguments about it too.
My opinion? I've taught kids aged about 8-17 programming languages at summer computer camps for over 10 years, and I have otherwise been an educator for a while. Despite my own preferences and opinions, the truth is that unless you try to start someone out on INTERCAL, language doesn't matter. It's not like Bobby would have become a phenomenal programmer, except you erroneously chose Language X to start him off with, and he hated it, so he became a hair stylist instead.
If someone doesn't do well at all with C++, while BASIC for example might be less scary, in my experience it makes no difference to reapproach programming with the different language. At least as far as making a difference between having a real interest/performance, and the distinct lack thereof. If someone is going to "get" programming, they'll be able to get it with any common programming language. Period.
Furthermore, a kid's understanding of a programming language is going to depend much more on the quality of the tutoring/teaching/etc. methodologies, but that's another topic for another time.
Probably should have lined up my pronouns better -- I was trying to say that regardless of the legitimacy of claims that "downloads don't lead to lost sales", people are going to download things illegally simply because it doesn't feel that illegal.
The fundamental problem with many "digital things" (like in this case, music and video files) is that there is a huge disconnect between their expected real-world analogs and the actual laws (both physical and legal) governing the digital-world in which they exist.
The fundamental technical know-how to write programs from scratch to make high-quality copies of media files is really pretty rare. Just the same way that say actually painting an excellent replica of a Rembrandt is something that very few people can do. The main difference is that once someone writes a program to copy media files (which may even be a perfectly legal commercial piece of software to begin with) the dissemination of such a program is absolutely trivial. Teaching the population how to paint stunning rip-offs of Rembrandts isn't just not trivial, it's impossible.
Yes, a few people talk of the myths of lost sales and such, but honestly that's all retrospective crap.
The truth is that psychologically, if you can do something with a couple clicks of a button while you sit at home eating potato chips in your living room, it doesn't feel that illegal, regardless of what the law is or isn't.
I'll even make a car analogy. Say that my mother holds the law in very high regard, even when it comes to piracy. If I go and visit her in a stolen car, she will at minimum yell at me quite profusely, and it wouldn't be unforeseeable that she might call the authorities. But if we go for a drive (in my own un-stolen car) and listen to things from my MP3 player, she wouldn't even think to ask if the music was procured legally. If I told her that it was all downloaded illegally, she may tell me that it isn't right, but she's still probably going to be listening to the music, and there's also no way she's reporting the illegal downloads to any authority.
Up until a few years ago, I taught programming languages at a few different summer computer camps, to kids basically ranging about 9-17 years old, for a total of about nine or ten summers. And for what it's worth, I also currently work full-time in a science/tech program for middle school and high school students in an urban area.
For the not-yet-(anywhere near-)college age groups, I have found that C++ is by far and wide the best teaching language, mainly due to its flexibility. That is, you can cover OOP if you want, but you don't have to. You can cover interaction with actual computer memory, but you don't have to. Etc. I think that is a much more important premise than narrowing the root of programming excellence down to one singular paradigm.
The actual discipline of computer science, like virtually all academic fields, is not actually laid out in a nice, neat, linear, easy-to-teach, and trivially-defined path. C++ gives new learners of CS many different avenues to branch out to without the rigors of learning multiple languages as an initiation ritual. Say what you want about the language in general (or for any other specific purposes) but it is an absolutely fantastic teaching language because it has the potential to cover many important paradigms.
'Open Source' is different from 'open source'. Just because a non-profit organization steps it and tries to redefine English phrases doesn't mean the rest of the world has to follow it.
Hmmmm.... can't redefine English phrases? Ever hear of "pro-choice"?
For all intents and purposes, you're correct with the facts. But speaking of family values, do you not remember Bill Clinton's sexual practices (in the most storied and important building in the US, none the less) committing a crime in attempted cover-up, and also ordering a military strike in the thick of his personal and legal mess to take the press off of him? And then giving pure amnesty to family and cronies via pardons as he left office? Or perhaps while countless Louisianans were dying and/or having their lives destroyed by hurricane Katrina, Congressman William Jefferson used a National Guard helicopter to retrieve personal belongings? Already mentioned Spitzer.... and those are hardly the only embarrassing episodes in recent memory.
My point is that a very good percentage of news articles about about a Republican doing something stupid are often more about embarrassing and discrediting the party than they are about a thorough depiction of of the events that spurred the story at hand to begin with. Surveys show that there are substantially (on the scale of 2-5 times) more Democrats than Republicans in journalism. (source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0603/p02s01-usgn.html) And I think almost all of them will find honest answers to the questions they ask. Yes, a pretty decent number of Republicans have been douche bags. That's an honest fact. But they don't even ask the question of how douche bag-esque Democrats have been lately. I don't believe the discrepancy, if any, is large.
It isn't just Slashdot.
Look back through any recent news article about a Republican who has done something illegal and/or really stupid. You're not only going to see the word 'Republican' much more often, but news stories also like ask alarmist questions like, "Is this indicative of further corruption in the Republican party?" or any other comment that will lead a reader to at least ponder widespread misconduct in the Republican party.
While there isn't any true intense misconduct in this particular article, all you have to do is look back to Elliot Spitzer's demise as a real example; most news stories did not plaster the word 'Democrat' all over, let alone suggest a party-wide fallout from the scandal.
Just the observations of an independent with a pretty staunch disdain for both major political parties....
Several years ago I named my final project in a compiler construction class Hillary Clinton. The main reasons being that it was a bitch, and every time I used it I could say that I was executing Hillary Clinton. (And when it would freeze up before I got all the kinks out, I'd also have no choice but to kill the Hillary Clinton process as well.)
It is only overpriced if it doesn't sell.
By definition, the iPhone is not overpriced, because people are willing to pay the asking price.
Just like gasoline, right? I'm sure you're writing emails to all of those senators looking into price gouging by the oil companies and telling them to stop wasting their time, too.
Apple makes things, okay? And they're not even terribly important things, like parts for space shuttles or instruments that treat cancer. Apple's stuff lets you listen to Avril Lavigne while you jog and call your Aunt Sally on her birthday. Sure, their products are extremely nice overall, they have gained a (well-deserved) reputation as customer service leaders, but the one who made the assertion that Apple is becoming the next Microsoft is right on the money.
Hello world, Apple is going out of their way to lock you into their product line. I suppose the main difference here is that many of Microsoft's tactics have proven to be illegal, and at this point, it seems that Apple has done a decent job of staying on the up and up. (As someone who is pretty indifferent when it comes to Apple, I would argue that they utilized some technicalities in acquiring rights to the name iPhone that Slashdotters would generally lambaste Microsoft for, but that's a different story). But back to my point, as someone who loves the freedom of things like OSS, I could never prance around saying "I love being locked in by Apple" regardless of what mechanisms, legal or otherwise, were in place to do that to me. Now Apple supporters are going to proclaim that they make the finest products on the market so they aren't locked in by Apple, they just continually choose to buy their products. Just like Abercrombie & Fitch always seems to make the clothes that fit you the best, right? Does anyone truly think that Apple is never going to fail them? Does anyone remember the mid-90s? Apple can make some pretty crappy stuff. And they will again here and there, and you're going to be locked into buying it if you want such interoperability with Apple's product lines. And Apple won't care so long as their community of support keeps on trying to rationalize every lame thing they do.
True story.
Sadly.
So one day whilst I was an undergrad computer science student, the department sysadmin decided it would be a good day to back up the student directories. There wasn't enough free space on the hard drive, so he decided to clear some up. He found some random file that seemed to be a good candidate for deletion, as it was a) rather large and b) he couldn't quite figure out what it really was. So he canned it. And then when he went to copy the student directories.... oops! Where did they go? It just so happens that this "mystery" file was actually the student directories. Needless to say, much irritation ensued. I suppose it is one thing to lose all of your department's students' files, and its another thing to lose them all while trying to back them up, but to do so by intentionally deleting them without knowing what they were. That, my friends, takes a very, very special sysadmin.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because those of us on Slashdot are just doing so many threesomes these days.
Hmmm.... that's odd.... the Cylons must have managed to just miss all of Picon's wireless access points with their barrage of nukes. Or maybe it was just part of their "plan" all along?
Poll a few hundred English lit professors about which one novel you should start with to get a kid into the classics and you are going to get a few hundred very different and extremely opinionated answers. Put them all in the same room, and you'll get a lot of interesting arguments about it too.
My opinion? I've taught kids aged about 8-17 programming languages at summer computer camps for over 10 years, and I have otherwise been an educator for a while. Despite my own preferences and opinions, the truth is that unless you try to start someone out on INTERCAL, language doesn't matter. It's not like Bobby would have become a phenomenal programmer, except you erroneously chose Language X to start him off with, and he hated it, so he became a hair stylist instead.
If someone doesn't do well at all with C++, while BASIC for example might be less scary, in my experience it makes no difference to reapproach programming with the different language. At least as far as making a difference between having a real interest/performance, and the distinct lack thereof. If someone is going to "get" programming, they'll be able to get it with any common programming language. Period.
Furthermore, a kid's understanding of a programming language is going to depend much more on the quality of the tutoring/teaching/etc. methodologies, but that's another topic for another time.
Probably should have lined up my pronouns better -- I was trying to say that regardless of the legitimacy of claims that "downloads don't lead to lost sales", people are going to download things illegally simply because it doesn't feel that illegal.
The fundamental problem with many "digital things" (like in this case, music and video files) is that there is a huge disconnect between their expected real-world analogs and the actual laws (both physical and legal) governing the digital-world in which they exist.
The fundamental technical know-how to write programs from scratch to make high-quality copies of media files is really pretty rare. Just the same way that say actually painting an excellent replica of a Rembrandt is something that very few people can do. The main difference is that once someone writes a program to copy media files (which may even be a perfectly legal commercial piece of software to begin with) the dissemination of such a program is absolutely trivial. Teaching the population how to paint stunning rip-offs of Rembrandts isn't just not trivial, it's impossible.
Yes, a few people talk of the myths of lost sales and such, but honestly that's all retrospective crap.
The truth is that psychologically, if you can do something with a couple clicks of a button while you sit at home eating potato chips in your living room, it doesn't feel that illegal, regardless of what the law is or isn't.
I'll even make a car analogy. Say that my mother holds the law in very high regard, even when it comes to piracy. If I go and visit her in a stolen car, she will at minimum yell at me quite profusely, and it wouldn't be unforeseeable that she might call the authorities. But if we go for a drive (in my own un-stolen car) and listen to things from my MP3 player, she wouldn't even think to ask if the music was procured legally. If I told her that it was all downloaded illegally, she may tell me that it isn't right, but she's still probably going to be listening to the music, and there's also no way she's reporting the illegal downloads to any authority.
Up until a few years ago, I taught programming languages at a few different summer computer camps, to kids basically ranging about 9-17 years old, for a total of about nine or ten summers. And for what it's worth, I also currently work full-time in a science/tech program for middle school and high school students in an urban area.
For the not-yet-(anywhere near-)college age groups, I have found that C++ is by far and wide the best teaching language, mainly due to its flexibility. That is, you can cover OOP if you want, but you don't have to. You can cover interaction with actual computer memory, but you don't have to. Etc. I think that is a much more important premise than narrowing the root of programming excellence down to one singular paradigm.
The actual discipline of computer science, like virtually all academic fields, is not actually laid out in a nice, neat, linear, easy-to-teach, and trivially-defined path. C++ gives new learners of CS many different avenues to branch out to without the rigors of learning multiple languages as an initiation ritual. Say what you want about the language in general (or for any other specific purposes) but it is an absolutely fantastic teaching language because it has the potential to cover many important paradigms.
'Open Source' is different from 'open source'. Just because a non-profit organization steps it and tries to redefine English phrases doesn't mean the rest of the world has to follow it.
Hmmmm.... can't redefine English phrases? Ever hear of "pro-choice"?
For all intents and purposes, you're correct with the facts. But speaking of family values, do you not remember Bill Clinton's sexual practices (in the most storied and important building in the US, none the less) committing a crime in attempted cover-up, and also ordering a military strike in the thick of his personal and legal mess to take the press off of him? And then giving pure amnesty to family and cronies via pardons as he left office? Or perhaps while countless Louisianans were dying and/or having their lives destroyed by hurricane Katrina, Congressman William Jefferson used a National Guard helicopter to retrieve personal belongings? Already mentioned Spitzer.... and those are hardly the only embarrassing episodes in recent memory.
My point is that a very good percentage of news articles about about a Republican doing something stupid are often more about embarrassing and discrediting the party than they are about a thorough depiction of of the events that spurred the story at hand to begin with. Surveys show that there are substantially (on the scale of 2-5 times) more Democrats than Republicans in journalism. (source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0603/p02s01-usgn.html) And I think almost all of them will find honest answers to the questions they ask. Yes, a pretty decent number of Republicans have been douche bags. That's an honest fact. But they don't even ask the question of how douche bag-esque Democrats have been lately. I don't believe the discrepancy, if any, is large.
It isn't just Slashdot. Look back through any recent news article about a Republican who has done something illegal and/or really stupid. You're not only going to see the word 'Republican' much more often, but news stories also like ask alarmist questions like, "Is this indicative of further corruption in the Republican party?" or any other comment that will lead a reader to at least ponder widespread misconduct in the Republican party. While there isn't any true intense misconduct in this particular article, all you have to do is look back to Elliot Spitzer's demise as a real example; most news stories did not plaster the word 'Democrat' all over, let alone suggest a party-wide fallout from the scandal. Just the observations of an independent with a pretty staunch disdain for both major political parties....
Several years ago I named my final project in a compiler construction class Hillary Clinton. The main reasons being that it was a bitch, and every time I used it I could say that I was executing Hillary Clinton. (And when it would freeze up before I got all the kinks out, I'd also have no choice but to kill the Hillary Clinton process as well.)
Yes, but if there were ever to be a book entitled "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with RuPaul" I would so definitely need to own that.
The article failed to mention that detection of the Neutrinos was aided by the fact that they were joyriding around Dimension X in a flying car.
Two words (and a punctuation device):
Hiscock & Barclay (http://www.hiscockbarclay.com/home/)
I dunno about Barclay, but Hiscock must be pretty impressive (not to mention respected) to achieve named partner status in a law firm....
Just like gasoline, right? I'm sure you're writing emails to all of those senators looking into price gouging by the oil companies and telling them to stop wasting their time, too.
Apple makes things, okay? And they're not even terribly important things, like parts for space shuttles or instruments that treat cancer. Apple's stuff lets you listen to Avril Lavigne while you jog and call your Aunt Sally on her birthday. Sure, their products are extremely nice overall, they have gained a (well-deserved) reputation as customer service leaders, but the one who made the assertion that Apple is becoming the next Microsoft is right on the money.
Hello world, Apple is going out of their way to lock you into their product line. I suppose the main difference here is that many of Microsoft's tactics have proven to be illegal, and at this point, it seems that Apple has done a decent job of staying on the up and up. (As someone who is pretty indifferent when it comes to Apple, I would argue that they utilized some technicalities in acquiring rights to the name iPhone that Slashdotters would generally lambaste Microsoft for, but that's a different story). But back to my point, as someone who loves the freedom of things like OSS, I could never prance around saying "I love being locked in by Apple" regardless of what mechanisms, legal or otherwise, were in place to do that to me. Now Apple supporters are going to proclaim that they make the finest products on the market so they aren't locked in by Apple, they just continually choose to buy their products. Just like Abercrombie & Fitch always seems to make the clothes that fit you the best, right? Does anyone truly think that Apple is never going to fail them? Does anyone remember the mid-90s? Apple can make some pretty crappy stuff. And they will again here and there, and you're going to be locked into buying it if you want such interoperability with Apple's product lines. And Apple won't care so long as their community of support keeps on trying to rationalize every lame thing they do.
True story. Sadly. So one day whilst I was an undergrad computer science student, the department sysadmin decided it would be a good day to back up the student directories. There wasn't enough free space on the hard drive, so he decided to clear some up. He found some random file that seemed to be a good candidate for deletion, as it was a) rather large and b) he couldn't quite figure out what it really was. So he canned it. And then when he went to copy the student directories.... oops! Where did they go? It just so happens that this "mystery" file was actually the student directories. Needless to say, much irritation ensued. I suppose it is one thing to lose all of your department's students' files, and its another thing to lose them all while trying to back them up, but to do so by intentionally deleting them without knowing what they were. That, my friends, takes a very, very special sysadmin.