You are talking about the second or third generation of driverless vehicles. The first generation will just be cheaper. (The ones on the road now are a part of the zeroth generation, i.e., before any major adoption.)
Sorry, I can give general explanations about how ice shelves work, but I don't know the specifics of Larson B. But clearly different sea levels would mean that the ice shelves would form in different places. As to what name they would have...
As an aside a lot of the argument among paleontologists, and others of the ilk, is about names rather than about facts. E.g. there often isn't enough solid information available to say whether two fossils are of different species...so people guess. Some people like to split spieces on small basis, others like to clump, and there often isn't a good reason to decide between the two. Similarly, what difference in locations would justify giving an ice shelf at two different times, and slightly different location, a different name? The ice wouldn't be the same, because the ice on an ice shelf is continually, if usually slowly, moving out to sea. But people like to draw boundaries.
Saying that it formed during the current interglacial is misleading. This is an ice shelf, and ice shelves are the result of glaciers moving into the ocean and not breaking off. So it probably formed because the glaciers started moving a bit more rapidly, and it also probably had ice at the oceanwards side that broke off and melted, and which may well have been older.
FWIW, glaciers are always moving, but as the start to melt their motion speeds up. For a glacier to grow it needs to be accumulating new ice faster than it looses it through moving into an area where the ice is removed faster than its formed. This was said in a sort of general way, because some glaciers live high in the mountains, and when they descend they drop chunks of ice down hill. In the case of an ice shelf, the glaciers are pushing out onto the ocean and floating, so the weight of the terminus is suspended. This "ice shelf" creates back pressure that tends to hold the glacier in place, but the glacier is also pressing the ice shelf to move further out to sea, where it becomes unstable.
It looks interesting, but they need to work on their documentation. I wasn't able to find anything about reading and writing random access files. It had many things that appear easy to do in Rust which are difficult in various different languages, but I couldn't find a way in which it was notably better overall in any area.
FWIW I was mainly comparing it against D and Python, with a few considerations of Ruby. I should have compared it against Ada, but it's been too long since I actually used it. I can't reasonably compare it against C++ as I haven't used it significantly since the STL was adopted. (At that point I was stuck using access basic, and relatively to that nearly *anything* looks good.) The only fortran I could compare it against is FORTRAN IV, and they are nearly disjoint in the tasks that they would be good at.
Mind you, this comparison is based purely on reading over the documentation, and shouldn't be taken too seriously. So often the contents of the package doesn't match what it says on the packaging. Given what it says on the packaging my favorite language would be Vala, but actually I never use it.
I wish you weren't telling the truth. The drug companies seem totally without either morals or ethics. But vaccination is necessary in a population that lives as densely as humans do and which has rapid transportation. So I'm in favor of this law. I'm just not in favor of many others, and in particular I don't like the way that the wealthy and powerful are let off the hook...and here I'm explicitly including drug companies.
Step 1 should be that all publicly funded research is publicly available (with a very few carefully and explicitly stated caveats). Step 2 is that while patents can be obtained based on publicly funded research, all citizens of the country have free licenses to those patents. Step 3 is some other reforms of patent law. Step 4 is some way for the laws to actually be enforced.
Please note that the order of these steps is not particularly important, as they are virtually independent, and that most of them would have good effects beyond the pharmaceutical industry. But one of the, I believe existing, laws that needs to be enforced is that the results of all trials in qualification for FDA approval need to be made public.
While sediments *are* gathered up by glaciers as they move, the sediments are gathered at the bottom of the glaciers...unless you are proposing some mechanism for moving the sediments from the bottom to the top.
The problem is, when you have a complicated feedback relation it's not quite clear what "*primarily*" means. Often there are threshold effects, and it is, indeed, the last straw that breaks the camel's back, because that's what pushes things past the threshold into a region where amplification happens rather than decay.
Calling either Mao or Stalin a scientist is so strange as to qualify for wierd. Hitler had some doctors working for him who would meet the qualification, but I haven't been able to think of any other scientists that engaged in multiple murders, though I sure some must have existed. I suspect that this is largely because scientists are rarely in positions of power, and don't like to expose themselves to violent circumstances. But not entirely. The kind of mind that will devote itself to science must of needs be relatively passive and oriented towards careful observation. Such people will only take personally violent action under extreme provocation.
The problem is that nobody has shown that those "whack-jobs" weren't following orthodoxly accepted interpretations of the Koran. That some "scholars claim those quotes are taken out of context" is clearly true, but that doesn't mean it's not a reasonable and common interpretation.
The Koran actually *is* more viscious than even the Old Testament. Partially this is due to the fact that Mohammed spent much of his life leading an armed struggle against armed opponents, and needed to rally and advise his followers (i.e., armies).
OTOH, it would be quite interesting to know what the New Testament would be like if we had accurate records rather than third hand accounts written down a century or more later. *Was* JC leading a revolutionary action group against the Romans? (Well, against the governor installed by the Romans.) John the Baptist was, almost without question. You can't believe the words written in the Bible, even if they are phrased as quotes. They weren't quotes. They were written down by someone who never met Jesus, and never met anyone who had seen him within the last 30 years. And the intervening period seems to be filled only with verbal reporting. Calling them "second hand information" is praising them fullsomely.
I'm not clear about why you talk about "Jewish hell". IIUC the Jews (pre-christian, at least) weren't big on hell of any sort. They "sort of" believed that their spirits wouldn't die with the body, and had a "sort of" abode of those spirits called, IIRC Gehenna. Originally, IIUC, this was a sort of grey and washed out place, as paradise is a sort of garden named after the Persian gardens around the palaces which contained plants from every country that they has conquerored.
Currently Judianism seems to contain much closer analogs of Heven and Hell than it is my understanding that it originally did. There are verses in the Bible (including in the Old Testament) that can be interpreted as references to such. And, possibly, there was considerable popular belief that never became scriptural. But I believe that the images that they had of the "abode of the dead" trace back to the Babylonian captivity (see the poem "Innana in the underworld"), and few traces became a part of the scriptures. As for the sources of the Babylonian belief, I trace this back to the custom of burying containers of seeds (wheat, esp.) to preserve it for later use. This may also have been done in Egypt, but it doesn't appear to have become understandably a part of their myth. (I have a really hard time understanding Osiris as a grain god...perhaps much longer ago than the funerary cult, though.)
One would expect the Jews to have incorporated Egyptian beliefs into their religion, but the Egyptians believed that when you died if you were too sinful, your soul was eaten by a monster, whereas if you were righteous you were allowed to work in the fields forever. Not exactly any exhalted heaven, and not much of a hell, either. And IIUC the Jews adapted to this by pretty much ignoring what happened after you died, as least as "official theology". (Remember that Moses was raised as an Egyptian noble, and when he came to power over the Jews he found it necessary to suppress numerous splinter sects by refusing to allow any image of their god to be made [apparently the dominant group at this time worshiped a wind god, though Moses shows signs of worshiping a solar god, like Ikhanaton did]. So he probably handled other religious differences the same way: "It's a holy mystery, and must not be talked about!")
Not every time, but frequently enough to cause one to wonder about their goals.
OTOH, if the parents don't respect education, there isn't going to be much that a teacher can do. But it should be possible for the teacher to get them out of class if they are disruptive as well as invincibly ignorant (which doesn't mean stupid, it means believing that education isn't worth the bother).
I'll agree that he's trying to do "something". I'm just not certain what. And I'm quite suspicios that if I found out that "philanthropy" would not be among the words I would use to describe it.
I'll agree that the schools are in terrible shape. This doesn't mean that no matter what you'll do you'll make things better. And it doesn't mean that I'm going to trust someone who has a long history of pushing MSWind into inappropriate and damaging environments. I don't understand the rationaile behind "common core" well enough to criticize it in detail, but it doesn't seem to be "successful" in any case that I've heard of, so I suspect it's something else like "leave no child behind" that tries to cram everybody into the same mould, but use an name that sounds good. Everyone clearly understands that there is the need for a common core of educational materials...except the teachers who must deal with those who don't fit in.
You could probably do that in a similar way, i.e., use a phosphorous allow, form it into small beads filled with a non-reactive medium (say nitrogen) and embed it in a matrix. I doubt, however, that it would have any useful properties. I'm rather certain that, unless it was your goal in the design, it wouldn't have any spectacular ones.
FWIW, Titanium ribbons will burn so furiously that they will not only burn in nitrogen as well as oxygen, they will actually pull oxygen away from water. (Well, ok, so wil phosphorous, but phosphorous won't touch nitrogen.)
To be fair, the UN is actually better than most of the governments that compose it. And it *does* appear to have reduced wars. That's pretty good for something that was originally set up as a military alliance to allow "allies" who didn't trust each other to work together.
Well... to be fair if the energy of insolation were already being totally retained, then increasing the amount of CO2 and methane would have no effect on heating, and one should expect a decrease in effectiveness as one approaches the limiting case. Not that I think they are actually reasoning that way, and not that this would mean the other effects would decrease...
Well, actually since they quote 95% they're being conservative. 100% of the models are KNOWN to be in error. The questions are always "How much in error?" and "In which direction?". And nobody really knows the answers to those questions, though sometimes there are reasonable estimates.
What he's really saying is "I don't like your answers, so you're wrong. And I don't need to prove it." Since he's politically well connected this is actually largely correct. The only error is logically evident (from my phrasing of "what he was really saying").
If you're going to consider obsolete languages (the keyboards are no longer made) I'd nominate Prograf. It was a dataflow language that would have been great for multiprocessor systems except for two problems: 1) It was released for the Mac System 3 and never successfully transitioned to later systems, and 2) There was no text representation of the programs, it was all graphic, which was quickly too verbose to handle as the programs increased in size.
Not clear on what you consider "good". The ones that occur to me are WxWidgets, Qt, and Tcl...which can be good depending on your purpose. All of those can be used on Linux, Apple, and MSWind, and probably on BSD. All of them can be used from C, C++, Python, and Ruby. And, I assume, other languages.
If you want a good graphic builder IDE, then Qt has some quite decent tools. I'm not sure about WxWidgets. Tcl used to, but they seem to have died of neglect.
Then there's Java which goes its own way, and has it's own GUI, and IDE with a gui-builder...but while adequate for many purposes, I find the Java gui to be limited even when compared to Tcl. Still, it *is* cross-platform.
So I guess it comes down to "what do you mean by 'good'?".
If I read the article announcing the release correctly, then while the basic C# language is (probably) open source, it's definitely not free. You can't make a version of it without the agreement of MS, and the released version by MS is... incomplete. Parts of it are portable, others aren't. So you can only use it as MS desires.
IIRC the release agreement said something like "permission is given to any full and complete implementation that fully implements the specifications" I forget whether the specifications were subject to unilateral change by MS, but even if they weren't it means that the language cannot be implemented by anyone except as desired by MS. Also, of course, the libraries were not made available, which reders it essentially useless except on MSWind machines.
Now just because their public promise didn't allow something doesn't mean that they won't ignore any "infringing" code as long as they feel like it. But it does mean that only a trusting (characterization deleted) would put their own time and effort behind it...without some form of idemnification.
So I'm going to pass on C#. It'd rather trust Oracle's Java (which I also avoid, though not all the time).
OTOH, I disagree with the basic premise of the article. It is my belief that one shouldn't learn a new language to improve ones job prospects, but rather to improve ones skills as a programmer. So if you know C++, then you don't learn C# or Java, but rather Eiffel, Lisp, or Haskell, or possibly OCaML.
OTOH, If you already know C++ or Java, it's certainly easier to learn Python or Ruby. So easy that a basic knowledge can be learned in a day. So if you're tight on time, that will allow you to expand your capabilities in small increments. (But a basic knowledge won't teach you the libraries, which is where the important differences lie.)
FWIW, I first learned Fortan, actually FORTRAN, since it was before Fortran 77 was standardized. But then I went on to Snobol, PL/1, etc. I never did really master LISP1.5, but I didn't have access to a running implementation. With Lisps a decent IDE is nearly a necessity to start with. (Currently, if you want to pick up a lisp, I'd recomment Racket Scheme from PLT. It's got a decent development environment.)
OTOH, I dropped C++ about 20 years ago, and am no longer fluent in the modern dialect (something I keep meaning to correct). My current favorite language is D (Digital Mars D, or dmd), before that I cycled between Ruby and Python. Before I retired I normally wrote in whatever my employer chose, which, towards the end, was MSAccess Basic...a really foul language. So foul I wrote routines in Eiffel that did the work and just used the MSAccess Basic as a driver. Not only was it faster to write, it was also faster to execute, and unlike MSAccessBasic, the programs wouldn't arbitrarily start failing after a few months of use. (In the AccessBasis I used to need to save the programs as text files so that I could re-import them after the system corrupted them. Figuring out that there wasn't actually anything wrong with the programs took a lot of quite furstrating debugging, since a newly entered program would work properly. It's my guess that the system was storing some invisible binary code in with the source, so the source became unusable when the code got corrupted...why the code ever got corrupted I never found out, but it happened repeatedly to many different programs.) I presume that MS has by now fixed the problem, but it persisted over at least 5 years and multiple different versions of MSAccess.
That's a reasonable thing to expect, but it doesn't seem to be a part of the current US political culture. Is it even any longer a part of the Japanese political culture?
??? I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. I rather despise Obama as a president, but I can't think of any particular scandal...and I mean something *I* consider a scandal, not something that titillates the shocked sensibilities of those who are appalled by a "wardrobe malfunction". The closest I can come is his acceptance of RomenyCare as his health plan (i.e. "ObamaCare"), but while appalling, I can hardly consider that a scandal.
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You are talking about the second or third generation of driverless vehicles. The first generation will just be cheaper. (The ones on the road now are a part of the zeroth generation, i.e., before any major adoption.)
Sorry, I can give general explanations about how ice shelves work, but I don't know the specifics of Larson B. But clearly different sea levels would mean that the ice shelves would form in different places. As to what name they would have ...
As an aside a lot of the argument among paleontologists, and others of the ilk, is about names rather than about facts. E.g. there often isn't enough solid information available to say whether two fossils are of different species...so people guess. Some people like to split spieces on small basis, others like to clump, and there often isn't a good reason to decide between the two. Similarly, what difference in locations would justify giving an ice shelf at two different times, and slightly different location, a different name? The ice wouldn't be the same, because the ice on an ice shelf is continually, if usually slowly, moving out to sea. But people like to draw boundaries.
Saying that it formed during the current interglacial is misleading. This is an ice shelf, and ice shelves are the result of glaciers moving into the ocean and not breaking off. So it probably formed because the glaciers started moving a bit more rapidly, and it also probably had ice at the oceanwards side that broke off and melted, and which may well have been older.
FWIW, glaciers are always moving, but as the start to melt their motion speeds up. For a glacier to grow it needs to be accumulating new ice faster than it looses it through moving into an area where the ice is removed faster than its formed. This was said in a sort of general way, because some glaciers live high in the mountains, and when they descend they drop chunks of ice down hill. In the case of an ice shelf, the glaciers are pushing out onto the ocean and floating, so the weight of the terminus is suspended. This "ice shelf" creates back pressure that tends to hold the glacier in place, but the glacier is also pressing the ice shelf to move further out to sea, where it becomes unstable.
It looks interesting, but they need to work on their documentation. I wasn't able to find anything about reading and writing random access files. It had many things that appear easy to do in Rust which are difficult in various different languages, but I couldn't find a way in which it was notably better overall in any area.
FWIW I was mainly comparing it against D and Python, with a few considerations of Ruby. I should have compared it against Ada, but it's been too long since I actually used it. I can't reasonably compare it against C++ as I haven't used it significantly since the STL was adopted. (At that point I was stuck using access basic, and relatively to that nearly *anything* looks good.) The only fortran I could compare it against is FORTRAN IV, and they are nearly disjoint in the tasks that they would be good at.
Mind you, this comparison is based purely on reading over the documentation, and shouldn't be taken too seriously. So often the contents of the package doesn't match what it says on the packaging. Given what it says on the packaging my favorite language would be Vala, but actually I never use it.
I wish you weren't telling the truth. The drug companies seem totally without either morals or ethics. But vaccination is necessary in a population that lives as densely as humans do and which has rapid transportation. So I'm in favor of this law. I'm just not in favor of many others, and in particular I don't like the way that the wealthy and powerful are let off the hook...and here I'm explicitly including drug companies.
Step 1 should be that all publicly funded research is publicly available (with a very few carefully and explicitly stated caveats).
Step 2 is that while patents can be obtained based on publicly funded research, all citizens of the country have free licenses to those patents.
Step 3 is some other reforms of patent law.
Step 4 is some way for the laws to actually be enforced.
Please note that the order of these steps is not particularly important, as they are virtually independent, and that most of them would have good effects beyond the pharmaceutical industry. But one of the, I believe existing, laws that needs to be enforced is that the results of all trials in qualification for FDA approval need to be made public.
While sediments *are* gathered up by glaciers as they move, the sediments are gathered at the bottom of the glaciers...unless you are proposing some mechanism for moving the sediments from the bottom to the top.
The problem is, when you have a complicated feedback relation it's not quite clear what "*primarily*" means. Often there are threshold effects, and it is, indeed, the last straw that breaks the camel's back, because that's what pushes things past the threshold into a region where amplification happens rather than decay.
Calling either Mao or Stalin a scientist is so strange as to qualify for wierd. Hitler had some doctors working for him who would meet the qualification, but I haven't been able to think of any other scientists that engaged in multiple murders, though I sure some must have existed. I suspect that this is largely because scientists are rarely in positions of power, and don't like to expose themselves to violent circumstances. But not entirely. The kind of mind that will devote itself to science must of needs be relatively passive and oriented towards careful observation. Such people will only take personally violent action under extreme provocation.
The problem is that nobody has shown that those "whack-jobs" weren't following orthodoxly accepted interpretations of the Koran. That some "scholars claim those quotes are taken out of context" is clearly true, but that doesn't mean it's not a reasonable and common interpretation.
The Koran actually *is* more viscious than even the Old Testament. Partially this is due to the fact that Mohammed spent much of his life leading an armed struggle against armed opponents, and needed to rally and advise his followers (i.e., armies).
OTOH, it would be quite interesting to know what the New Testament would be like if we had accurate records rather than third hand accounts written down a century or more later. *Was* JC leading a revolutionary action group against the Romans? (Well, against the governor installed by the Romans.) John the Baptist was, almost without question. You can't believe the words written in the Bible, even if they are phrased as quotes. They weren't quotes. They were written down by someone who never met Jesus, and never met anyone who had seen him within the last 30 years. And the intervening period seems to be filled only with verbal reporting. Calling them "second hand information" is praising them fullsomely.
I'm not clear about why you talk about "Jewish hell". IIUC the Jews (pre-christian, at least) weren't big on hell of any sort. They "sort of" believed that their spirits wouldn't die with the body, and had a "sort of" abode of those spirits called, IIRC Gehenna. Originally, IIUC, this was a sort of grey and washed out place, as paradise is a sort of garden named after the Persian gardens around the palaces which contained plants from every country that they has conquerored.
Currently Judianism seems to contain much closer analogs of Heven and Hell than it is my understanding that it originally did. There are verses in the Bible (including in the Old Testament) that can be interpreted as references to such. And, possibly, there was considerable popular belief that never became scriptural. But I believe that the images that they had of the "abode of the dead" trace back to the Babylonian captivity (see the poem "Innana in the underworld"), and few traces became a part of the scriptures. As for the sources of the Babylonian belief, I trace this back to the custom of burying containers of seeds (wheat, esp.) to preserve it for later use. This may also have been done in Egypt, but it doesn't appear to have become understandably a part of their myth. (I have a really hard time understanding Osiris as a grain god...perhaps much longer ago than the funerary cult, though.)
One would expect the Jews to have incorporated Egyptian beliefs into their religion, but the Egyptians believed that when you died if you were too sinful, your soul was eaten by a monster, whereas if you were righteous you were allowed to work in the fields forever. Not exactly any exhalted heaven, and not much of a hell, either. And IIUC the Jews adapted to this by pretty much ignoring what happened after you died, as least as "official theology". (Remember that Moses was raised as an Egyptian noble, and when he came to power over the Jews he found it necessary to suppress numerous splinter sects by refusing to allow any image of their god to be made [apparently the dominant group at this time worshiped a wind god, though Moses shows signs of worshiping a solar god, like Ikhanaton did]. So he probably handled other religious differences the same way: "It's a holy mystery, and must not be talked about!")
Not every time, but frequently enough to cause one to wonder about their goals.
OTOH, if the parents don't respect education, there isn't going to be much that a teacher can do. But it should be possible for the teacher to get them out of class if they are disruptive as well as invincibly ignorant (which doesn't mean stupid, it means believing that education isn't worth the bother).
I'll agree that he's trying to do "something". I'm just not certain what. And I'm quite suspicios that if I found out that "philanthropy" would not be among the words I would use to describe it.
I'll agree that the schools are in terrible shape. This doesn't mean that no matter what you'll do you'll make things better. And it doesn't mean that I'm going to trust someone who has a long history of pushing MSWind into inappropriate and damaging environments. I don't understand the rationaile behind "common core" well enough to criticize it in detail, but it doesn't seem to be "successful" in any case that I've heard of, so I suspect it's something else like "leave no child behind" that tries to cram everybody into the same mould, but use an name that sounds good. Everyone clearly understands that there is the need for a common core of educational materials...except the teachers who must deal with those who don't fit in.
You could probably do that in a similar way, i.e., use a phosphorous allow, form it into small beads filled with a non-reactive medium (say nitrogen) and embed it in a matrix. I doubt, however, that it would have any useful properties. I'm rather certain that, unless it was your goal in the design, it wouldn't have any spectacular ones.
FWIW, Titanium ribbons will burn so furiously that they will not only burn in nitrogen as well as oxygen, they will actually pull oxygen away from water. (Well, ok, so wil phosphorous, but phosphorous won't touch nitrogen.)
How about both?
To be fair, the UN is actually better than most of the governments that compose it. And it *does* appear to have reduced wars. That's pretty good for something that was originally set up as a military alliance to allow "allies" who didn't trust each other to work together.
Well... to be fair if the energy of insolation were already being totally retained, then increasing the amount of CO2 and methane would have no effect on heating, and one should expect a decrease in effectiveness as one approaches the limiting case. Not that I think they are actually reasoning that way, and not that this would mean the other effects would decrease...
Well, actually since they quote 95% they're being conservative. 100% of the models are KNOWN to be in error. The questions are always "How much in error?" and "In which direction?". And nobody really knows the answers to those questions, though sometimes there are reasonable estimates.
What he's really saying is "I don't like your answers, so you're wrong. And I don't need to prove it." Since he's politically well connected this is actually largely correct. The only error is logically evident (from my phrasing of "what he was really saying").
If you're going to consider obsolete languages (the keyboards are no longer made) I'd nominate Prograf. It was a dataflow language that would have been great for multiprocessor systems except for two problems:
1) It was released for the Mac System 3 and never successfully transitioned to later systems, and
2) There was no text representation of the programs, it was all graphic, which was quickly too verbose to handle as the programs increased in size.
Not clear on what you consider "good". The ones that occur to me are WxWidgets, Qt, and Tcl...which can be good depending on your purpose. All of those can be used on Linux, Apple, and MSWind, and probably on BSD. All of them can be used from C, C++, Python, and Ruby. And, I assume, other languages.
If you want a good graphic builder IDE, then Qt has some quite decent tools. I'm not sure about WxWidgets. Tcl used to, but they seem to have died of neglect.
Then there's Java which goes its own way, and has it's own GUI, and IDE with a gui-builder...but while adequate for many purposes, I find the Java gui to be limited even when compared to Tcl. Still, it *is* cross-platform.
So I guess it comes down to "what do you mean by 'good'?".
If I read the article announcing the release correctly, then while the basic C# language is (probably) open source, it's definitely not free. You can't make a version of it without the agreement of MS, and the released version by MS is ... incomplete. Parts of it are portable, others aren't. So you can only use it as MS desires.
IIRC the release agreement said something like "permission is given to any full and complete implementation that fully implements the specifications" I forget whether the specifications were subject to unilateral change by MS, but even if they weren't it means that the language cannot be implemented by anyone except as desired by MS. Also, of course, the libraries were not made available, which reders it essentially useless except on MSWind machines.
Now just because their public promise didn't allow something doesn't mean that they won't ignore any "infringing" code as long as they feel like it. But it does mean that only a trusting (characterization deleted) would put their own time and effort behind it...without some form of idemnification.
So I'm going to pass on C#. It'd rather trust Oracle's Java (which I also avoid, though not all the time).
Different langaguages are different.
OTOH, I disagree with the basic premise of the article. It is my belief that one shouldn't learn a new language to improve ones job prospects, but rather to improve ones skills as a programmer. So if you know C++, then you don't learn C# or Java, but rather Eiffel, Lisp, or Haskell, or possibly OCaML.
OTOH, If you already know C++ or Java, it's certainly easier to learn Python or Ruby. So easy that a basic knowledge can be learned in a day. So if you're tight on time, that will allow you to expand your capabilities in small increments. (But a basic knowledge won't teach you the libraries, which is where the important differences lie.)
FWIW, I first learned Fortan, actually FORTRAN, since it was before Fortran 77 was standardized. But then I went on to Snobol, PL/1, etc. I never did really master LISP1.5, but I didn't have access to a running implementation. With Lisps a decent IDE is nearly a necessity to start with. (Currently, if you want to pick up a lisp, I'd recomment Racket Scheme from PLT. It's got a decent development environment.)
OTOH, I dropped C++ about 20 years ago, and am no longer fluent in the modern dialect (something I keep meaning to correct). My current favorite language is D (Digital Mars D, or dmd), before that I cycled between Ruby and Python. Before I retired I normally wrote in whatever my employer chose, which, towards the end, was MSAccess Basic...a really foul language. So foul I wrote routines in Eiffel that did the work and just used the MSAccess Basic as a driver. Not only was it faster to write, it was also faster to execute, and unlike MSAccessBasic, the programs wouldn't arbitrarily start failing after a few months of use. (In the AccessBasis I used to need to save the programs as text files so that I could re-import them after the system corrupted them. Figuring out that there wasn't actually anything wrong with the programs took a lot of quite furstrating debugging, since a newly entered program would work properly. It's my guess that the system was storing some invisible binary code in with the source, so the source became unusable when the code got corrupted...why the code ever got corrupted I never found out, but it happened repeatedly to many different programs.) I presume that MS has by now fixed the problem, but it persisted over at least 5 years and multiple different versions of MSAccess.
That's a reasonable thing to expect, but it doesn't seem to be a part of the current US political culture. Is it even any longer a part of the Japanese political culture?
Bingo! I'd forgotten that! That definitely qualifies as a scandal, since her communications are supposed to be public.
???
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. I rather despise Obama as a president, but I can't think of any particular scandal...and I mean something *I* consider a scandal, not something that titillates the shocked sensibilities of those who are appalled by a "wardrobe malfunction". The closest I can come is his acceptance of RomenyCare as his health plan (i.e. "ObamaCare"), but while appalling, I can hardly consider that a scandal.
Well, while I do agree, the Secretary of State is not supposed to set policy. So she doesn't deserve much blame for that.