The problem may also have been in that you didn't really visit the right specialist. For one, ENT's (or mine, anyway) don't have the equipment to perform a hearing test.
I'd suggest that you go speak to an audiologist, who actually does have the background and equipment for that.
What kind of hearing test might you be referring to? A cursory talk with your doctor, or a real test inside a sound-proofed chamber which tests your hearing at varying frequencies and decibels?
Certainly, a real hearing test would take only a maximum of 10 minutes, but the equipment for it isn't everywhere, and I doubt a general practitioner would have that equipment readily on hand.
Considering that this would be for an introductory programming course, I think the teacher can safely assume that most of the students don't have any knowledge of programming, and those who do, already know the lessons which would be taught by such a lesson.
The point of the exercise isn't for one person to successfully put peanut butter and jelly on the bread from the first try. It's for the entire class to understand that common-sense instructions to computers will not work.
Giving out a handout of available operations automatically removes everything else that would be possible -- such as the common-sense instructions most people would provide. It's not as obvious that common-sense instructions don't work if nobody tries it.
Maybe it's just me, but I find that it uses low-level concepts which could unnecessarily frustrate beginners. IE, pointers and memory allocation. And as pointed out before, getting C to work on Windows is a bit more difficult; most students in an introductory programming class would likely be using Windows.
Java, on the other hand, wouldn't be too difficult to get working. Admittedly, good use of Java would require knowledge of OOP, but at least it has a garbage collector and you can always have the students stick to one big main method and ignore the "public static void" stuff until they've gotten more used to it.
You might be surprised. If I remember correctly, the Turing Test as originally devised required the human to attempt to convince the judge that he/she was a computer, and the computer that it was human.
Although these days I believe both are required to convince the judge that they're human, which seems rather biased towards the human side.
The point of the Turing test is because of the prickly definition of "intelligence". How do you define it?
Is it the ability of juggle mathematical equations in your head? If so, then you might call computers intelligent. And a lot of humans, not.
Turing kind of took the easy way out, and defined intelligence to being what humans can (presumably) recognize: humanity. We know humans are intelligent, so if we can get computers to act like humans, such that we can't tell the difference, then that would be a big step on the way to artificial intelligence.
Of course, there's quite a few arguments which fight against this idea, including the Chinese Room argument, but that's something for later.
True, he never explicitly said anything about it, and the host could have had reason to believe that it was related to his database, and would therefore have required access to it.
However, from his comments the tech support didn't "tell him so" when they accessed his database. Nor do I believe that they intended to snoop. Rather, my impression is that it was more insidious -- the tech just accessed it without any thought of privacy concerns and seemed to mention that they accessed his database as an aside.
The point isn't that they should or shouldn't have access to your database for whatever maintenance you might require; I think we'd all agree that if they need the access, they can have it.
The problem though lies in that it seems like the hosting company has no safeguards as to the protection of your information. Asking for permission prior to looking through the OP's database would at least have given the appearance that they valued his privacy.
I believe that a matter which many commenters appear to have missed, is that the OP's comments indicated that there was no need to for the techs to look through his database.
It would seem to me that yes, if the host requires access to help you, then they shouldn't be hit over the head for using it, but that YOU, the owner of that data, should be informed about it at some point.
From the OP's comments, he was never formally informed that his database was being accessed, he only deduced it through the tech support's comments.
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The problem may also have been in that you didn't really visit the right specialist. For one, ENT's (or mine, anyway) don't have the equipment to perform a hearing test.
I'd suggest that you go speak to an audiologist, who actually does have the background and equipment for that.
What kind of hearing test might you be referring to? A cursory talk with your doctor, or a real test inside a sound-proofed chamber which tests your hearing at varying frequencies and decibels? Certainly, a real hearing test would take only a maximum of 10 minutes, but the equipment for it isn't everywhere, and I doubt a general practitioner would have that equipment readily on hand.
Considering that this would be for an introductory programming course, I think the teacher can safely assume that most of the students don't have any knowledge of programming, and those who do, already know the lessons which would be taught by such a lesson.
The point of the exercise isn't for one person to successfully put peanut butter and jelly on the bread from the first try. It's for the entire class to understand that common-sense instructions to computers will not work.
Giving out a handout of available operations automatically removes everything else that would be possible -- such as the common-sense instructions most people would provide. It's not as obvious that common-sense instructions don't work if nobody tries it.
Err...C, a beginner's programming language?
Maybe it's just me, but I find that it uses low-level concepts which could unnecessarily frustrate beginners. IE, pointers and memory allocation. And as pointed out before, getting C to work on Windows is a bit more difficult; most students in an introductory programming class would likely be using Windows.
Java, on the other hand, wouldn't be too difficult to get working. Admittedly, good use of Java would require knowledge of OOP, but at least it has a garbage collector and you can always have the students stick to one big main method and ignore the "public static void" stuff until they've gotten more used to it.
You might be surprised. If I remember correctly, the Turing Test as originally devised required the human to attempt to convince the judge that he/she was a computer, and the computer that it was human. Although these days I believe both are required to convince the judge that they're human, which seems rather biased towards the human side.
The point of the Turing test is because of the prickly definition of "intelligence". How do you define it?
Is it the ability of juggle mathematical equations in your head? If so, then you might call computers intelligent. And a lot of humans, not.
Turing kind of took the easy way out, and defined intelligence to being what humans can (presumably) recognize: humanity. We know humans are intelligent, so if we can get computers to act like humans, such that we can't tell the difference, then that would be a big step on the way to artificial intelligence.
Of course, there's quite a few arguments which fight against this idea, including the Chinese Room argument, but that's something for later.
True, he never explicitly said anything about it, and the host could have had reason to believe that it was related to his database, and would therefore have required access to it.
However, from his comments the tech support didn't "tell him so" when they accessed his database. Nor do I believe that they intended to snoop. Rather, my impression is that it was more insidious -- the tech just accessed it without any thought of privacy concerns and seemed to mention that they accessed his database as an aside.
The point isn't that they should or shouldn't have access to your database for whatever maintenance you might require; I think we'd all agree that if they need the access, they can have it.
The problem though lies in that it seems like the hosting company has no safeguards as to the protection of your information. Asking for permission prior to looking through the OP's database would at least have given the appearance that they valued his privacy.
I believe that a matter which many commenters appear to have missed, is that the OP's comments indicated that there was no need to for the techs to look through his database.
It would seem to me that yes, if the host requires access to help you, then they shouldn't be hit over the head for using it, but that YOU, the owner of that data, should be informed about it at some point.
From the OP's comments, he was never formally informed that his database was being accessed, he only deduced it through the tech support's comments.