But I doubt anyone is going to take the computer's opinion as gospel.
I am less doubtful than you. Anything that can be measured, and that especially includes numbers spat out by a computer algorithm, is something that managers love to use regardless of whether it actually measures anything significant or, if it does, regardless of any caveats the user is supposed to consider before using it.
BASIC (and I'm referring to the variety of BASIC on old 8 bit computers), is not as out of line as some people think, but it teaches very specific things. Ultimately a machine language program will be doing things very much like GOTOs, GOSUBs, and globally accessible variables.
Of course it doesn't have modern language constructs (it barely has for loops), and if you were to use it for teaching at some point you would move on to something else, but that's not really the problem. The real problem is much simpler: the variety of BASIC that runs on old 8 bit computers--runs on old 8 bit computers, and your 11 year old probably isn't interested in old 8 bit computers. If the target doesn't care about the platform it runs on, that's going to end up a pretty big barrier.
I often suggest Javascript when it comes to languages. It is a scripting language and produces immediate results, it does things the kid would be familiar with, you can create something useful relatively fast, there's lots of existing code using it that you can examine, and you're guaranteed to have something that can run it.
Of course this is a digression. All these recommendations for languages and not so many for books, which was the original question.
Comments on Reddit point out that -- This has happened before in other places with a fake sister -- the suicide was committed by jumping off a building, while the user threatened to commit suicide by shooting himself -- the suicide happened several days after the nasty replies were deleted -- the user's real name was supposedly Jerry, but the name of the man who killed himself was William.
Furthermore, carefully reading the Reddit link itself, Reddit has not received a subpoena. Rather, Reddit has been *told by the supposed sister of the user* that they *will be subpoenaed* in the future; at no point does Reddit claim to have actually received the subpoena. As a bonus, the man's supposed sister claims "We were told by our lawyer not to give any other information out such as our full names or the people to be named in the lawsuit", which makes her claims immune to verification.
It's quite likely that some troll saw a suicide in the newspaper and decided to claim that the suicide was connected when they were really just trolling. Ruling that out would require having the subpoena, not just having a claim that one was sent.
That's exactly the problem. They're describing their progress in order to justify the claim that they're 50 years away from fusion. If they don't know whether the next step is going to move the project a lot or show that they need to solve even more problems, then how can they know that they are some specific number of years away?
Many of the answers to that question seem to be "here's an area in which we've improved, and in which we need more improvement". The problem is that it doesn't then state how far along they are. Something like "we improved this from 10% to 50% and we think that 70% is enough" would be very different from "we improved this from 1% to 2% and we need to get to 70%"
I did explain it to them. They didn't understand it. It was probably more an unwillingness to take 5 minutes trying to understand what I was saying than it was actual stupidity, but the net effect was the same: they didn't understand it. They eventually allowed an exchange, but they clearly had no idea what I was talking about and only exchanged it because of policy. (Of course the second one had the same problem and I had to return it.)
What if the people at the store don't understand the customer's complaint about the item?
I once returned a CD/MP3 player (back when people still used such things instead of digital MP3 players) to Fry's because resuming an MP3 at greater than 256 seconds would resume it at (time mod 256). Anyone with even the slightest bit of computer training should have been able to figure out that the firmware was saving only one byte of resume data and that therefore every one of that model on the shelf would have the same problem. The customer service droids did not comprehend this and made me exchange it with another one anyway, which I had to then return (I did get a refund then).
If that had been Best Buy, I'd have been out a restocking fee. And I can think of lots of other cases. (I've never tried asking a customer service droid which HDTVs accept 240P signals and therefore can show Playstation 1 games. But I doubt that if I returned a TV for being unable to do this they would do anything but hook it up to the store TV feed and say "see, it works fine".)
It's government corruption. They said they would never release it and then released it. "Well, we only promised that the particular people who were working there at the time wouldn't release it, not that the government wouldn't release it" is an excuse to blatantly not do what the government promise it would do.
Just because terrorists would be better off disguising their bombs doesn't mean that something that looks like an undisguised bomb must actually be safe. If you did conclude such things were safe, they would now become the perfect disguise and therefore no longer be safe.
And even ignoring that, many terrorists and other criminals are not smart (and/or just make bad decisions under stress, and bombing a place is probably pretty stressful) and may make obvious bombs even though a really efficient terrorist would have disguised it.
One of the strange aspects of this case is something you obliquely pointed out: those news articles describe a "place of worship" and a "religious group", which enraged "youths" and offended the "other religious community". In the West (I don't know about India) this kind of bizarre omission of facts normally means that the incident was perpetrated by Muslims but the newspaper doesn't want people to think of Muslims as violent and is intentionally biasing their reporting. It's sometimes extended to other groups; for instance, political affiliation is mentioned a lot less for Democratic perpetrators than for Republicans.
A) "The password didn't work. We're assuming you lied to us. You're fired." B) "That sounds like a 'no'. You're fired." C) See B. D) See B. E) See B.
The administration is not a computer program, a genie, or even a code of law. You can't work around them by obeying their literal words in a non-cooperative way; they'll just recognize that you're being non-cooperative and ignore the fact that you followed their literal words That's a very geekish way of thinking and it will utterly fail in the real world.
Nobody's managed to crack the 3DS yet. The PS3 is basically only cracked for a certain firmware version. As far as I know the Xbox 360 is only cracked to a very limited extent.
The fact that they committed the fraud to increase their revenue in the first place disproves this idea. By your reasoning they wouldn't need to commit fraud to earn money, get convicted, and pass the conviction fine on to the customer--they could just directly charge the customer the amount of money they wanted to earn.
Any large company is going to be divided into a number of departments. The fact that one department's loss of money (from bringing government fines onto the company) can be compensated by another department's gain (by charging the customer more) isn't going to keep the first department from suffering from the loss.
I just tried it. (Remember, image search, not regular search). Whether I put quotes around it or not, it mixed up suchi and sushi in the same page as well as providing the link asking if you meant sushi (if you're providing a link for if I meant sushi, why are you also putting sushi results on the main page as well?)
suchi is actually pretty common since it's an Indian name; most of the legitimate hits are of that.
Although the roads are financed using taxes, presumably if there hadn't been taxes or other forms of government interference, there would have been private roads which are better than the ones we have now.
By your reasoning, if the government collected a $100 tax from everyone and used it to pay everyone a $95 check, anyone who opposes taxes would be obliged to throw the check in the garbage on the grounds that it was paid for by taxes.
Digital downloads are copyrighted, so other people cannot compete by selling the same digital downloads. Copyright, of course, is a government-granted monopoly.
Well, yeah, there were never any murder or manslaughter charges. That just makes it worse--they are basically trying and punishing him for murder without actually having to bring charges for murder that he could possibly rebut.
They don't try to give the lawbreakers a fighting chance.
It seems like most of the complaints here are because people think this will work. It feels wrong that you actually cannot get away with breaking the law.
Think about it: Do you think it's a bad law to prohibit uninsured motorists? Do you think the police are likely to abuse this? (It uses existing cameras. If the police wanted to abuse it they can abuse the existing cameras already.) No? Then exactly what is your objection, other than that it doesn't seem fair that there's no way to get around it?
Claiming that we're 10 minutes to war, even a figurative 10 minutes, is like claiming that we're 20 years from nuclear fusion.
It's not something you can sensibly calculate, and any attempt is going to be based more on personal prejudices. They will also have an incentive to constantly keep the clock near doomsday for the same reason that the Homeland Security threat level never goes down to green.
Slashdot Mirror
Obvious troll is obvious. The moment you used "patriarchy" I knew you weren't earnest (or at least not a modern feminist).
I suppose nobody on this blog is modern, then.
But I doubt anyone is going to take the computer's opinion as gospel.
I am less doubtful than you. Anything that can be measured, and that especially includes numbers spat out by a computer algorithm, is something that managers love to use regardless of whether it actually measures anything significant or, if it does, regardless of any caveats the user is supposed to consider before using it.
BASIC (and I'm referring to the variety of BASIC on old 8 bit computers), is not as out of line as some people think, but it teaches very specific things. Ultimately a machine language program will be doing things very much like GOTOs, GOSUBs, and globally accessible variables.
Of course it doesn't have modern language constructs (it barely has for loops), and if you were to use it for teaching at some point you would move on to something else, but that's not really the problem. The real problem is much simpler: the variety of BASIC that runs on old 8 bit computers--runs on old 8 bit computers, and your 11 year old probably isn't interested in old 8 bit computers. If the target doesn't care about the platform it runs on, that's going to end up a pretty big barrier.
I often suggest Javascript when it comes to languages. It is a scripting language and produces immediate results, it does things the kid would be familiar with, you can create something useful relatively fast, there's lots of existing code using it that you can examine, and you're guaranteed to have something that can run it.
Of course this is a digression. All these recommendations for languages and not so many for books, which was the original question.
Oh, and the dead man was 51 years old, which is very unusual for the Reddit demographic.
Comments on Reddit point out that
-- This has happened before in other places with a fake sister
-- the suicide was committed by jumping off a building, while the user threatened to commit suicide by shooting himself
-- the suicide happened several days after the nasty replies were deleted
-- the user's real name was supposedly Jerry, but the name of the man who killed himself was William.
Furthermore, carefully reading the Reddit link itself, Reddit has not received a subpoena. Rather, Reddit has been *told by the supposed sister of the user* that they *will be subpoenaed* in the future; at no point does Reddit claim to have actually received the subpoena. As a bonus, the man's supposed sister claims "We were told by our lawyer not to give any other information out such as our full names or the people to be named in the lawsuit", which makes her claims immune to verification.
It's quite likely that some troll saw a suicide in the newspaper and decided to claim that the suicide was connected when they were really just trolling. Ruling that out would require having the subpoena, not just having a claim that one was sent.
That's exactly the problem. They're describing their progress in order to justify the claim that they're 50 years away from fusion. If they don't know whether the next step is going to move the project a lot or show that they need to solve even more problems, then how can they know that they are some specific number of years away?
Many of the answers to that question seem to be "here's an area in which we've improved, and in which we need more improvement". The problem is that it doesn't then state how far along they are. Something like "we improved this from 10% to 50% and we think that 70% is enough" would be very different from "we improved this from 1% to 2% and we need to get to 70%"
I did explain it to them. They didn't understand it. It was probably more an unwillingness to take 5 minutes trying to understand what I was saying than it was actual stupidity, but the net effect was the same: they didn't understand it. They eventually allowed an exchange, but they clearly had no idea what I was talking about and only exchanged it because of policy. (Of course the second one had the same problem and I had to return it.)
What if the people at the store don't understand the customer's complaint about the item?
I once returned a CD/MP3 player (back when people still used such things instead of digital MP3 players) to Fry's because resuming an MP3 at greater than 256 seconds would resume it at (time mod 256). Anyone with even the slightest bit of computer training should have been able to figure out that the firmware was saving only one byte of resume data and that therefore every one of that model on the shelf would have the same problem. The customer service droids did not comprehend this and made me exchange it with another one anyway, which I had to then return (I did get a refund then).
If that had been Best Buy, I'd have been out a restocking fee. And I can think of lots of other cases. (I've never tried asking a customer service droid which HDTVs accept 240P signals and therefore can show Playstation 1 games. But I doubt that if I returned a TV for being unable to do this they would do anything but hook it up to the store TV feed and say "see, it works fine".)
I'm sure we could get that percentage even higher if you raised it to 15 years, or 100.
"During at least one year in a seven year period" should be a warning sign of abuse of statistics.
It's government corruption. They said they would never release it and then released it. "Well, we only promised that the particular people who were working there at the time wouldn't release it, not that the government wouldn't release it" is an excuse to blatantly not do what the government promise it would do.
Just because terrorists would be better off disguising their bombs doesn't mean that something that looks like an undisguised bomb must actually be safe. If you did conclude such things were safe, they would now become the perfect disguise and therefore no longer be safe.
And even ignoring that, many terrorists and other criminals are not smart (and/or just make bad decisions under stress, and bombing a place is probably pretty stressful) and may make obvious bombs even though a really efficient terrorist would have disguised it.
One of the strange aspects of this case is something you obliquely pointed out: those news articles describe a "place of worship" and a "religious group", which enraged "youths" and offended the "other religious community". In the West (I don't know about India) this kind of bizarre omission of facts normally means that the incident was perpetrated by Muslims but the newspaper doesn't want people to think of Muslims as violent and is intentionally biasing their reporting. It's sometimes extended to other groups; for instance, political affiliation is mentioned a lot less for Democratic perpetrators than for Republicans.
It's a string of characters used as a password. It doesn't indicate assent to the statement made by that string of characters.
A) "The password didn't work. We're assuming you lied to us. You're fired."
B) "That sounds like a 'no'. You're fired."
C) See B.
D) See B.
E) See B.
The administration is not a computer program, a genie, or even a code of law. You can't work around them by obeying their literal words in a non-cooperative way; they'll just recognize that you're being non-cooperative and ignore the fact that you followed their literal words That's a very geekish way of thinking and it will utterly fail in the real world.
Nobody's managed to crack the 3DS yet. The PS3 is basically only cracked for a certain firmware version. As far as I know the Xbox 360 is only cracked to a very limited extent.
If Obama hadn't thrown a roughly equal amount on the stimulus....
The fact that they committed the fraud to increase their revenue in the first place disproves this idea. By your reasoning they wouldn't need to commit fraud to earn money, get convicted, and pass the conviction fine on to the customer--they could just directly charge the customer the amount of money they wanted to earn.
Any large company is going to be divided into a number of departments. The fact that one department's loss of money (from bringing government fines onto the company) can be compensated by another department's gain (by charging the customer more) isn't going to keep the first department from suffering from the loss.
I just tried it. (Remember, image search, not regular search). Whether I put quotes around it or not, it mixed up suchi and sushi in the same page as well as providing the link asking if you meant sushi (if you're providing a link for if I meant sushi, why are you also putting sushi results on the main page as well?)
suchi is actually pretty common since it's an Indian name; most of the legitimate hits are of that.
Although the roads are financed using taxes, presumably if there hadn't been taxes or other forms of government interference, there would have been private roads which are better than the ones we have now.
By your reasoning, if the government collected a $100 tax from everyone and used it to pay everyone a $95 check, anyone who opposes taxes would be obliged to throw the check in the garbage on the grounds that it was paid for by taxes.
Digital downloads are copyrighted, so other people cannot compete by selling the same digital downloads. Copyright, of course, is a government-granted monopoly.
Well, yeah, there were never any murder or manslaughter charges. That just makes it worse--they are basically trying and punishing him for murder without actually having to bring charges for murder that he could possibly rebut.
That's what the article said. The Slashdot summary was misleading.
They don't try to give the lawbreakers a fighting chance.
It seems like most of the complaints here are because people think this will work. It feels wrong that you actually cannot get away with breaking the law.
Think about it: Do you think it's a bad law to prohibit uninsured motorists? Do you think the police are likely to abuse this? (It uses existing cameras. If the police wanted to abuse it they can abuse the existing cameras already.) No? Then exactly what is your objection, other than that it doesn't seem fair that there's no way to get around it?
Claiming that we're 10 minutes to war, even a figurative 10 minutes, is like claiming that we're 20 years from nuclear fusion.
It's not something you can sensibly calculate, and any attempt is going to be based more on personal prejudices. They will also have an incentive to constantly keep the clock near doomsday for the same reason that the Homeland Security threat level never goes down to green.