I never said it excuses him. I'm simply explaining that, contrary to the original poster's assertion, the kid is not necessarily too dumb or lazy to learn in school.
I've stayed in youth hostels in Rome and London, and various hotels in France, and never had to present any kind of ID, much less my passport. Where in Europe is this common? Maybe I'm not visiting the "right" hotels.
The AP CS exam doesn't qualify as anything beyond "Intro to Programming". I took it in high school even though the school had no class for it. I studied for half an hour the night before, and aced it. I'm not trying to pump myself up, it's just that the exam was useless.
Not everybody has a local community college. I certainly didn't when I was in high school. My school had absolutely no idea what to do with me. You might have been in a better position, and people in large cities near universities may be as well, but not everybody is that lucky.
Almost totally irrelevant, but NS actually stands for NeXT Software. The NS prefix was used for the OPENSTEP APIs. NeXTSTEP APIs used the NX prefix, for the obvious reason.
I always thought that programming should be taught from the outside in. Start on the extremes; learn an incredibly high-level language that shows you nothing of the nuts and bolts, like Lisp. At the same time, learn assembly, preferably a nice clean assembly that's easy to follow. Work your way up from assembly and down from Lisp until you meet in the middle somewhere.
Of course, I haven't ever tried this, so maybe it's just a load of crap.
It's not meaningless, it simply means something different. Strongly typed means that you can never take a piece of memory and reinterpret its bits as something other than what it actually is. Today, there are four corners (at least!) in language typing:
Strongly statically typed: strong typing is enforced at compile time rather than runtime. C++ resembles this, but doesn't go all the way because you can still cast pointers. Something like ML might be more like what this is.
Strongly dynamically typed: strong typing is enforced at runtime by type checks or any other mechanism. Examples of this abound. Lisp, Java, Python, Perl, Smalltalk, and the list goes on.
Weakly statically typed: type checking is done at compile time, but it's easy to get around. The most obvious example would be C.
Weakly dynamically typed: type checking can be done at runtime, but it isn't enforced. C++ with RTTI would fit somewhat in this category, as would Objective-C.
You sound just like the admin at my high school. Totally unable to see things from other people's perspectives, and trying to fix everything by locking accounts.
You serve the teachers, and you serve the students. You are support for them, not the ruler of your own private kingdom. You apparently aren't even competent enough to keep people from installing software on your systems, but instead of fixing the problem, you just kill the messenger.
Sometimes it doesn't matter how smart and motivated the kid is, the school simply will not teach anything more advanced than "Typing II" or "Introduction to Computer Programming". He can always learn things outside of school, but that's hardly "in school", is it?
A single kilogram of matter will contain approximately 6.02x10^23 protons and neutrons, plus assorted electrons. If we could somehow represent a single one of those with a single bit (unlikely), then it would still require more storage than is available to the entire planet just to track that single kilogram of matter. An entire room is even worse. And it's unlikely that a bit per particle would suffice. So, no, impractical for now and for the foreseeable future, sorry.
Seamless integration with Windows, a family of operating systems that over 90% of the public uses, and which only one company has full access to the internals of: Microsoft.
Hah! Windows doesn't even seamlessly integrate with itself, much less external products. Microsoft wouldn't know seamless integration if it hit them over the head while crying out, "Hello! I am seamless integration!"
Of course, they can pretend, which convinces most people.
I believe step 3 would be "get hauled off to the Ministry of Peace". And that is why none of the repairmen try anything a stupid as that.
When you live in a totalitarian society, the fact that you can evade surveillance is irrelevant. Simply doing so is a crime sufficient to get you sent to the gulag, or whatever they use for punishment.
The only vaguely similar thing that I know of is that anonymizer.com runs a free service for all of Iran under contract with some government agency or other. Is that what you were thinking of?
Conversations are protected by a Diffie-Hellman key exchange at the beginning, which exchanges an AES encryption key that's used on the entire conversation. The key exchange is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, but it's hard to pull off, and your conversation is completely secure past that.
Technically, Skype can talk to other Skype users or to anybody on the planet with a phone number. However, you're right that it's still a proprietary protocol.
It's a phone conversation if you use SkypeOut to call another telephone. It may qualify as a phone conversation (or a recording-restricted conversation in general) even if it's just between Skype, however. The law is not nearly as stupid as everybody on slashdot seems to think, and these kinds of technicalities rarely matter.
You're a total wacko. Maybe you didn't notice, but it was the foreign immigrants who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the foreign immigrants who built the US into the world superpower that it is. If immigration were going to destroy the country, it would have done so by now.
I certainly don't mean to disavow the contributions of the Mozilla team. Their work is significant, and probably the majority of what's there by now. However, the work done by Netscape is far more than 0.1%, and that was my objection.
Have you ever written any real-world code? Just because no Netscape code is left doesn't mean that Netscape's work doesn't still make up a huge part of the project. Rewritten code leaves its mark in design, implementation, data structures, algorithms, everything. Just because the individual characters have been retyped doesn't mean squat, and the old code is still a large part of the work even if it's all gone (which, as another poster pointed out, it's not).
Don't be ridiculous. While the Mozilla developers have done a lot, they never would have even gotten off the ground if Netscape hadn't written and then open sourced their code.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe this drivel got modded +5 Informative. I'm not even going to refute it, just laugh. Oh, and a big Fuck You to the mods.
I never said it excuses him. I'm simply explaining that, contrary to the original poster's assertion, the kid is not necessarily too dumb or lazy to learn in school.
I've stayed in youth hostels in Rome and London, and various hotels in France, and never had to present any kind of ID, much less my passport. Where in Europe is this common? Maybe I'm not visiting the "right" hotels.
The AP CS exam doesn't qualify as anything beyond "Intro to Programming". I took it in high school even though the school had no class for it. I studied for half an hour the night before, and aced it. I'm not trying to pump myself up, it's just that the exam was useless.
Not everybody has a local community college. I certainly didn't when I was in high school. My school had absolutely no idea what to do with me. You might have been in a better position, and people in large cities near universities may be as well, but not everybody is that lucky.
Almost totally irrelevant, but NS actually stands for NeXT Software. The NS prefix was used for the OPENSTEP APIs. NeXTSTEP APIs used the NX prefix, for the obvious reason.
I always thought that programming should be taught from the outside in. Start on the extremes; learn an incredibly high-level language that shows you nothing of the nuts and bolts, like Lisp. At the same time, learn assembly, preferably a nice clean assembly that's easy to follow. Work your way up from assembly and down from Lisp until you meet in the middle somewhere.
Of course, I haven't ever tried this, so maybe it's just a load of crap.
It's not meaningless, it simply means something different. Strongly typed means that you can never take a piece of memory and reinterpret its bits as something other than what it actually is. Today, there are four corners (at least!) in language typing:
Strongly statically typed: strong typing is enforced at compile time rather than runtime. C++ resembles this, but doesn't go all the way because you can still cast pointers. Something like ML might be more like what this is.
Strongly dynamically typed: strong typing is enforced at runtime by type checks or any other mechanism. Examples of this abound. Lisp, Java, Python, Perl, Smalltalk, and the list goes on.
Weakly statically typed: type checking is done at compile time, but it's easy to get around. The most obvious example would be C.
Weakly dynamically typed: type checking can be done at runtime, but it isn't enforced. C++ with RTTI would fit somewhat in this category, as would Objective-C.
How are dumb terminals and X11/Terminal Server sessions going to stop a hardware keylogger?
You sound just like the admin at my high school. Totally unable to see things from other people's perspectives, and trying to fix everything by locking accounts.
You serve the teachers, and you serve the students. You are support for them, not the ruler of your own private kingdom. You apparently aren't even competent enough to keep people from installing software on your systems, but instead of fixing the problem, you just kill the messenger.
Sometimes it doesn't matter how smart and motivated the kid is, the school simply will not teach anything more advanced than "Typing II" or "Introduction to Computer Programming". He can always learn things outside of school, but that's hardly "in school", is it?
A single kilogram of matter will contain approximately 6.02x10^23 protons and neutrons, plus assorted electrons. If we could somehow represent a single one of those with a single bit (unlikely), then it would still require more storage than is available to the entire planet just to track that single kilogram of matter. An entire room is even worse. And it's unlikely that a bit per particle would suffice. So, no, impractical for now and for the foreseeable future, sorry.
This is a cool idea if it makes the consumer think first about ordering online
Please, we are called "customers".
Number of people murdered by police states in the 20th century alone: hard to say, but probably 100 million.
Number of people murdered by corporations: a hell of a lot less.
Seamless integration with Windows, a family of operating systems that over 90% of the public uses, and which only one company has full access to the internals of: Microsoft.
Hah! Windows doesn't even seamlessly integrate with itself, much less external products. Microsoft wouldn't know seamless integration if it hit them over the head while crying out, "Hello! I am seamless integration!"
Of course, they can pretend, which convinces most people.
I believe step 3 would be "get hauled off to the Ministry of Peace". And that is why none of the repairmen try anything a stupid as that.
When you live in a totalitarian society, the fact that you can evade surveillance is irrelevant. Simply doing so is a crime sufficient to get you sent to the gulag, or whatever they use for punishment.
The only vaguely similar thing that I know of is that anonymizer.com runs a free service for all of Iran under contract with some government agency or other. Is that what you were thinking of?
Conversations are protected by a Diffie-Hellman key exchange at the beginning, which exchanges an AES encryption key that's used on the entire conversation. The key exchange is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, but it's hard to pull off, and your conversation is completely secure past that.
Technically, Skype can talk to other Skype users or to anybody on the planet with a phone number. However, you're right that it's still a proprietary protocol.
It's a phone conversation if you use SkypeOut to call another telephone. It may qualify as a phone conversation (or a recording-restricted conversation in general) even if it's just between Skype, however. The law is not nearly as stupid as everybody on slashdot seems to think, and these kinds of technicalities rarely matter.
You're a total wacko. Maybe you didn't notice, but it was the foreign immigrants who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the foreign immigrants who built the US into the world superpower that it is. If immigration were going to destroy the country, it would have done so by now.
I certainly don't mean to disavow the contributions of the Mozilla team. Their work is significant, and probably the majority of what's there by now. However, the work done by Netscape is far more than 0.1%, and that was my objection.
To do a complete search, you have to use BOTH search engines.
What makes you think that using both will make your search complete? I think it would take a lot more than that.
Have you ever written any real-world code? Just because no Netscape code is left doesn't mean that Netscape's work doesn't still make up a huge part of the project. Rewritten code leaves its mark in design, implementation, data structures, algorithms, everything. Just because the individual characters have been retyped doesn't mean squat, and the old code is still a large part of the work even if it's all gone (which, as another poster pointed out, it's not).
Don't be ridiculous. While the Mozilla developers have done a lot, they never would have even gotten off the ground if Netscape hadn't written and then open sourced their code.
This is just a summary of the mandate. It's entirely possible (and likely) that it includes phrasing such as "or on the next following school day...."