HA HA HA Ha ha ha ha!!! You're a funny motherfucker. Yup, you nailed it.
Yo Steve! Hey, check it out - this guy's got your number here, about how much better and more usable KDE is than OSX, and about how much better all the KDE apps are than that stuff *you're* giving away. So anyway, we think you should drop that Aqua mistake and use KDE instead. Isn't that a great idea? We could have an open source utopia.
Well, *that's* not very nice to say, Steve. The same to you, okay? Sheesh, we were just trying to help. Okay, fine. I'll tell him.
Hey dude, Steve says you should "shut the fuck up and go do your homework." I dunno, I thought he was kinda rude.
This makes a certain amount of sense. While many people do end up in credit trouble through no fault of their own (catastrophic medical bills, job loss, etc), very often people who end up with poor credit do so because they are unable to properly manage their fiances. Perhaps this indicates they are also irresponsible in other areas of their life.
It's an awfully big conceptual leap to suggest that people who get into debt and don't pay their bills are also likely to blow up airplanes, now isn't it? Or is "irresponsible" now synonymous with "terrorist"?
If I was going to be a terrorist, I'd make sure I had spectacular credit and not do anything else to stand out from the crowd. Which, I suppose, means that I would rack up $10,000 in credit card bills. Oh well, so much for good credit.
I think what we should have learned, but didn't, was that it's a BAD IDEA to support and fund any random unhinged loon and powermad dictator simply because he is the enemy of our current enemy, or because he is anti-communist.
Examples:
We support the Shah of Iran, the Ayatollahs declare holy war. Saddam Hussein attacks Iran, we support him. This turns out to be a bad idea. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, we support them. This, too, turns out to be a bad idea.
Yes, and you seem to be omitting an incident involving some planes and buildings. No, I'm not saying Iraq was responsible for 9/11. I am saying that 9/11 opened our eyes to the dangers of terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction such as those that Saddam continues to build in violation of the cease-fire terms and piles of UN resolutions.
If September 11 opened out eyes, why did we wait a year before deciding the world needed to be rid of Saddam? For chrissake, we *sold* him most of those weapons. Out of the 105 ampuls of biological agents Iraq declared to the UN, 85 came from the American Type Culture Collection in Manassas, VA in the 1980s. The rest came from the Pasteur Institute in France (yes, insert your little dig at the French here). As the article in Sunday's New York Times notes, it was legal to do this then. Nobody seems to have been too worried about what a murderous dictator might need the stuff for, but hey - business is business.
Of course, he was our friend then, and we didn't complain too loudly when he used them against Iran and the Kurds.
Look, Iraq is pretty much a nonentity as a global threat. Not only does the rest of the Arabic world hate him, he's seen as too Westernized and corrupt by the true believers, the CIA doesn't seem to think he's supporting terrorism, and if he were to try anything, he knows we'd obliterate his country. He may be amoral and psychotic, but he's not stupid.
Fine, then we're agreed that they don't have any kind of moral high ground. At least we've been honest about what our interests are.
I don't think either side has any moral high ground here. On one hand we say "Gotta stop those evil guys" while on the other, we've supported half of them when the purpose suited us.
Here's a thought: If we're so damn concerned about terrorist groups, why are we willing to piss off every Muslim in the world willing to strap C4 around his waist and walk into the mall?
Good grief, can you guys please get some more intelligent arguments? If we wanted Iraqi oil, we'd lift the sanctions and buy it, which would be far cheaper than military action. The main oil considerations here come from the French and Germans who don't want their deals with Saddam nullified by the new government.
Okay, let's call it "The War to Get People's Minds Off the Economy and Corporate Scandals", which describes it a lot better. Anybody else remember the timing? Right when it looked like Enron/Tyco/Global Crossing/Adelphia/ad nauseum were going to cause serious legislation, or at least investigations, we suddenly decided that Saddam was A Bad Man who had to go, immediately. Never mind North Korea, who said "Hey - we got nukes over here!" or Iran, who the CIA at least will confirm supports terrorism, and whose nuclear program is a lot farther along than Iraq's. Or did we just develop some moral qualms about dealing with brutal, murderous dictators?
Not concidentally, the price of gas will probably hit 3.00 a gallon, which will benefit - the oil companies, who, you must admit, are closely connected to the administration. But that's just conspiracy thinking...
Oh, and that bit about France and Germany not wanting to upset their deals? They're just looking out for their national interests, same as we say we are. Isn't that what independent governments are supposed to do?
Aside from England, Spain and Bulgaria, who else is there?
Australia, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Poland, and Portugal, for starters.
Let's see. South Korea is scared shitless of North Korea and needs us desperately, Japan is being polite (and is scared of North Korea), Israel is obvious (and needs our support and aid desperately), I don't know what we've offered Italy (or threatened them with), and the rest are not exactly major world powers.
We've been doing massive armtwisting, and this is all we've got? Besides, as others have pointed out, it's the leaders, not the people that are "supporting" us. For pretty obvious realpolitik reasons.
France, Germany, and Belgium do not constitute "the rest of the world". You wouldn't know it from the way the media lets the idiotic "unilateral" accusations go unchallenged, but there are dozens of other countries supporting the US.
Dozens, huh? If they are supporting us, they're not doing it very publicly. Aside from England, Spain and Bulgaria, who else is there? We can't even get Cameroon, Angola or Guinea on board. We're promising billions of dollars in bribes (how much did we offer Pakistan, who *still* turned us down?) If you can't strongarm some of the poorest countries in the world, you don't really have worldwide support.
If we go into Iraq by ourselves, or with just the UK, and without the UN's approval, that's pretty much the definition of "unilateral".
But, if he can claim that with a straight face I can say he is on the hook for the dot-bomb, the layoffs, and the ensuing recession. Since, I mean, he introduced the legislation that led to the Internet, right?
No, because he didn't introduce legislation saying people could do stupid and illegal things with it. Of course, nobody in government ever bothered to do much about *keeping* people from doing said stupid and illegal things, but that's about 530-some-odd people to blame.
That's hilarious - it's just a coax connector. If you read the copy, it never says anything about giving you free PPV, or even descramblig anything. It's a "Digital Cable Descrambler Filter for PPV", which means it's a filter for the descrambler. It happens to be a filter that passes everything. You're just left to assume that it gives you free porn. Cute. I wonder if that would work in court.
What's really funny is that somone's already bid $7.00 for it. It's a shame he only has one of them - he could make a lot of money. Or is he just bidding against himself?
Seriously: This type of scam works because subscribers don't understand how the system works. If you advertised a device which will allow you to pay no taxes, everyone would catch on quickly.
Sadly, you'd probably sell a bunch of them. People wouldn't catch on until the IRS came by to visit. For every semi-clueful person out there, there's a tax crank who's saying "Yeah - I'm getting one of these! I told you they had no constitutional right to do that!"
Perhaps, but I was talking about interfaces for dialog boxes. For a dialog that's not going to be resized, specifying coordinates, as long as you don't have to do it by hand, is the way to go. I agree, if you want to be able to resize the window, you need something better. HTML by itself isn't a good tool for precisely positioning things, unless you wanted to use stylesheets, but I think putting that into a window manager would be kinda overkill.
My experience with layout systems has been that they work great if you have three or four things in them, but after that, if you want any kind of layout, you have to put everything in subframes and it gets to be a real mess. I suppose a GUI would have helped, but I don't remember there being one in Tk, and the wxWindows project I worked on already had everything laid out by hand.
I haven't seen Netbeans, but it sounds interesting. Personally, I'd rather lay my dialog out exactly the way I want it to, by dragging around controls and resizing them, rather than diddle around with window.below and layout.add(item, left, top,...) or whatever and hope it comes out the way I intended.
Well Windows is heavily coordinate based -- and it encourages. Dialog boxes (for example) are defined as resources with sizes and locations all strictly defined in pixel coordinates.
No, dialog boxes are defined in dialog coordinates, which are relative values that are translated to pixels based on the current screen resolution and font size. I agree, this is not layout management, but it's sure as hell not hardcoded pixel coordinates.
Microsoft doesn't believe in layout management mainly because their programming styles haven't really changed since Windows 3.0, or at least Windows 95. Their style is mostly fixed, non-resizeable modal dialogs (which they should be flogged for - overuse of modal dialogs is evil evil evil), so they don't really need it anyway. Truth be told, aside from the resizing, I'd rather design dialogs in the Dialog Editor (or whatever they call it now) than on the fly with Tk/wxWindows/whatever. Yes, I've done it in all three.
You'll note an exception to this is doonesbury, which is hosted on ecomics. He has (almost) every comic from the beginning, only missing a few at first, probably due to having lost them...
Interesting, that. A bunch of years ago I worked on a CD product called "The Doonesbury Anthology", which was a collection of all the Doonesbury strips, with historical context, games, animations, etc. We (i.e. some poor temp slobs) had to scan in all the damn things, many of which were only available from newspaper clippings. There were a few (mostly the early ones) that are missing, mainly like you said, having disappeared into the mists of time.
This was just before the Doonesbury site went up, so those are the same images. Let me tell you, *that* was a hellacious job. Half a dozen scanners going full time, always behind schedule, all on slowass Pentium 90s (this was mid-1995). We had to dig up the strips from a bunch of different places, mainly because, for tax purposes, Garry Trudeau doesn't keep the original drawings (can you imagine what an original Doonesbury is worth?)
It's a shame the company (since assimilated into nothingness) screwed the marketing up so bad - we did two other Doonesbury products that also went thud. Has anybody ever heard of the Doonesbury Screensaver or the Election Game? (Of course, there are good reasons, perhaps. The screensaver didn't work with Windows 95 and the election game was in Visual Basic. Ah well. The comics were cool.)
Python is a language that is just as old, and arguably better from: most importantly a uniform standard of readability (enforced by using whitespace to delimit blocks (instead of {}), by avoiding overuse of cryptic symbols...
Please explain how using whitespace instead of some paired token adds readability, assuming your bracing style is reasonable. To me, having the braces there explicitly shows me that I have a block that starts *here* and ends *here*. Since I use the apparently unique style of having open and close braces in the same column (as opposed to K&R style), I can immedately see the block structure.
That said, I think Python is one of those cool languages I really need to learn some day, as soon as I have a project that I can use it for. And it *is* nice to know that everyone involved at least *has* an indentation policy. I don't suppose you can enforce a tabsize, can you? All the major stylistic wars solved, leaving all you energy available for editor advocacy.
2) Don't worry, no one but Larry Wall and a few other Illuminati really understand Perl. The rest of us just muddle through using the 35% or so of the language that gets 95% of our work done. Yeah, I look at CPAN code and say "Gee, I wish I could do that, whatever that does", but then again, most CPAN code I've seen is almost gratuitously arcane and complex. A few comments on the tricky bits wouldn't hurt anything, guys.
If you wanna learn Perl, I'd suggest getting the Perl Cookbook and browsing through it. I learn a lot of neat, useful tricks that way. The Camel book (Programming Perl) I think is a bit overrated, at least as a teaching book (which I suppose it isn't, really, but it sort of is, too). It's hard to find some things, and a lot of the examples assume you understand the lauguage as well as the authors do.
Still, *I'm* not giving up my copy anytime soon. So don't flame me for heresy.
I had a professor that *loved* APL. I think he was on the board of the APL Foundation or some such. The problem was, any time you came to him with some code that wasn't working right or that you had some question about, his response would be "You know, you can do that in a couple lines of APL" ('that' being a page and a half of Pascal).
I agree, APL was way cool as a language, or so they say. I could never figure any of it out. Then again, I'm no good at cryptograms either, or the Obfuscated C Contest. It's interesting to learn the origins, though. Didn't APL stand for "A Programming Language"?
Did you know in Las Vegas they install cell phone disrupters in the casinos?
Where can I get one of those? I need a portable one I can set up in restaurants and movie theaters, not to mention the really high power one for my car...
I agree with all you say here, but why do you have to have wireless? It's a whole lot easier to plug into a phone jack, dial up, and do your thing. If you're lucky, your ISP provides a web-based interface like TWIG. If not, you can always SSH in (you *do* get a shell account from your ISP, right?)
My suggestion would be to hit every college and university you can. I drove across the country and back 2 years ago, and imagined I'd find lots of wireless too. School computer labs or plain old dialup was *much* more realistic.
Along your route, I stopped at University of Utah (Salt Lake City), which has a big lab in the library, with wireless. However, you have to be a student to get access. I just used a floppy (remember floppies?) to move stuff from the laptop to a lab machine and did the FTP from there. Or, try unplugging an ether cable from a lab machine and plugging yours in. Might work - it does at University of Vermont (heh heh).
While on campus, try wandering around outside the dorms. I imagine you'll pick up a few access points there.
As for stuff to see, if you're not in a huge rush, take the scenic route across North Dakota and drive through the Teddy Roosevelt National Park, then go south and see Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial (crazyhorse.org, thanks to a previous poster). I cannot say enough about this one - it's about the most awesome sight I've seen. I hit it before Mt. Rushmore (they're about 35 or so miles apart) and it made Rushmore look small and insignificant.
When in Green River, Wyoming, don't forgt to see the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport (along the road to the Flaming Gorge Dam and Recreational Area). Then again, don't bother - it looks like this. The Bonneville Salt Flats are mightily impressive.
One other thing - you will not get a decent cup of coffee until you get to California. When I was in Cheyenne, I drove half an hour out of my way to find a Starbucks. Get a french press (you can get them in plastic - reccomended) and grind up some beans before you leave.
One other other thing - never eat, or even stop, at Stuckeys. Trust me on this.
Other than that, have a great trip, and like others here have said, don't let the tech get in the way of enjoying it.
Ah, I can see you haven't taken I-80 across Nevada. This is, without a doubt, the most godforsaken country I've ever seen, with the possible exception of Oklahoma or Texas. Flat, dead, dry, hot, with no redeeming features except for warehouse-shaped whorehouses and 75 MPH speed limits. The first gives you something to laugh at, the second gets you out of there faster. The primary visual stimuli are the messages alongside the highway, made by piling rocks up. Those are pretty cool. Otherwise, you might as well be on the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
HA HA HA Ha ha ha ha!!! You're a funny motherfucker. Yup, you nailed it.
Yo Steve! Hey, check it out - this guy's got your number here, about how much better and more usable KDE is than OSX, and about how much better all the KDE apps are than that stuff *you're* giving away. So anyway, we think you should drop that Aqua mistake and use KDE instead. Isn't that a great idea? We could have an open source utopia.
Well, *that's* not very nice to say, Steve. The same to you, okay? Sheesh, we were just trying to help. Okay, fine. I'll tell him.
Hey dude, Steve says you should "shut the fuck up and go do your homework." I dunno, I thought he was kinda rude.
This makes a certain amount of sense. While many people do end up in credit trouble through no fault of their own (catastrophic medical bills, job loss, etc), very often people who end up with poor credit do so because they are unable to properly manage their fiances. Perhaps this indicates they are also irresponsible in other areas of their life.
It's an awfully big conceptual leap to suggest that people who get into debt and don't pay their bills are also likely to blow up airplanes, now isn't it? Or is "irresponsible" now synonymous with "terrorist"?
If I was going to be a terrorist, I'd make sure I had spectacular credit and not do anything else to stand out from the crowd. Which, I suppose, means that I would rack up $10,000 in credit card bills. Oh well, so much for good credit.
Anyway, people are too paranoid about guns to be comfortable with anyone having a gun onboard, let alone normal passengers.
The main reason people don't want guns on board planes is because having bullets flying around a pressurized cabin is a Known Bad Idea.
I think what we should have learned, but didn't, was that it's a BAD IDEA to support and fund any random unhinged loon and powermad dictator simply because he is the enemy of our current enemy, or because he is anti-communist.
Examples:
We support the Shah of Iran, the Ayatollahs declare holy war.
Saddam Hussein attacks Iran, we support him. This turns out to be a bad idea.
Osama bin Laden and the Taliban fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, we support them. This, too, turns out to be a bad idea.
Anybody else remember the timing?
Yes, and you seem to be omitting an incident involving some planes and buildings. No, I'm not saying Iraq was responsible for 9/11. I am saying that 9/11 opened our eyes to the dangers of terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction such as those that Saddam continues to build in violation of the cease-fire terms and piles of UN resolutions.
If September 11 opened out eyes, why did we wait a year before deciding the world needed to be rid of Saddam? For chrissake, we *sold* him most of those weapons. Out of the 105 ampuls of biological agents Iraq declared to the UN, 85 came from the American Type Culture Collection in Manassas, VA in the 1980s. The rest came from the Pasteur Institute in France (yes, insert your little dig at the French here). As the article in Sunday's New York Times notes, it was legal to do this then. Nobody seems to have been too worried about what a murderous dictator might need the stuff for, but hey - business is business.
Of course, he was our friend then, and we didn't complain too loudly when he used them against Iran and the Kurds.
Look, Iraq is pretty much a nonentity as a global threat. Not only does the rest of the Arabic world hate him, he's seen as too Westernized and corrupt by the true believers, the CIA doesn't seem to think he's supporting terrorism, and if he were to try anything, he knows we'd obliterate his country. He may be amoral and psychotic, but he's not stupid.
Fine, then we're agreed that they don't have any kind of moral high ground. At least we've been honest about what our interests are.
I don't think either side has any moral high ground here. On one hand we say "Gotta stop those evil guys" while on the other, we've supported half of them when the purpose suited us.
Here's a thought: If we're so damn concerned about terrorist groups, why are we willing to piss off every Muslim in the world willing to strap C4 around his waist and walk into the mall?
the War for Oil
Good grief, can you guys please get some more intelligent arguments? If we wanted Iraqi oil, we'd lift the sanctions and buy it, which would be far cheaper than military action. The main oil considerations here come from the French and Germans who don't want their deals with Saddam nullified by the new government.
Okay, let's call it "The War to Get People's Minds Off the Economy and Corporate Scandals", which describes it a lot better. Anybody else remember the timing? Right when it looked like Enron/Tyco/Global Crossing/Adelphia/ad nauseum were going to cause serious legislation, or at least investigations, we suddenly decided that Saddam was A Bad Man who had to go, immediately. Never mind North Korea, who said "Hey - we got nukes over here!" or Iran, who the CIA at least will confirm supports terrorism, and whose nuclear program is a lot farther along than Iraq's. Or did we just develop some moral qualms about dealing with brutal, murderous dictators?
Not concidentally, the price of gas will probably hit 3.00 a gallon, which will benefit - the oil companies, who, you must admit, are closely connected to the administration. But that's just conspiracy thinking...
Oh, and that bit about France and Germany not wanting to upset their deals? They're just looking out for their national interests, same as we say we are. Isn't that what independent governments are supposed to do?
Aside from England, Spain and Bulgaria, who else is there?
Australia, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Poland, and Portugal, for starters.
Let's see. South Korea is scared shitless of North Korea and needs us desperately, Japan is being polite (and is scared of North Korea), Israel is obvious (and needs our support and aid desperately), I don't know what we've offered Italy (or threatened them with), and the rest are not exactly major world powers.
We've been doing massive armtwisting, and this is all we've got? Besides, as others have pointed out, it's the leaders, not the people that are "supporting" us. For pretty obvious realpolitik reasons.
France, Germany, and Belgium do not constitute "the rest of the world". You wouldn't know it from the way the media lets the idiotic "unilateral" accusations go unchallenged, but there are dozens of other countries supporting the US.
Dozens, huh? If they are supporting us, they're not doing it very publicly. Aside from England, Spain and Bulgaria, who else is there? We can't even get Cameroon, Angola or Guinea on board. We're promising billions of dollars in bribes (how much did we offer Pakistan, who *still* turned us down?) If you can't strongarm some of the poorest countries in the world, you don't really have worldwide support.
If we go into Iraq by ourselves, or with just the UK, and without the UN's approval, that's pretty much the definition of "unilateral".
But, if he can claim that with a straight face I can say he is on the hook for the dot-bomb, the layoffs, and the ensuing recession. Since, I mean, he introduced the legislation that led to the Internet, right?
No, because he didn't introduce legislation saying people could do stupid and illegal things with it. Of course, nobody in government ever bothered to do much about *keeping* people from doing said stupid and illegal things, but that's about 530-some-odd people to blame.
Why do I suddenly want to reformat and install linux, or even sell it and buy an IBM?
I dunno, because you're an idiot?
I mean I love this computer, but I HATE Al 'I created Pants' Gore. Democrats are idiot socialists when it comes to pretty much anything
Yes, and Republicans are arrogant fascists about just about everything. Isn't this fun?
Seriously, you don't think having the ex-Vice President of the United States on your board could be helpful? Or have I just been trolled?
It happens to be a filter that passes everything
Okay, I actually read the article. It actually does something. It just doesn't do much.
That's what I get for not reading first...
That's hilarious - it's just a coax connector. If you read the copy, it never says anything about giving you free PPV, or even descramblig anything. It's a "Digital Cable Descrambler Filter for PPV", which means it's a filter for the descrambler. It happens to be a filter that passes everything. You're just left to assume that it gives you free porn. Cute. I wonder if that would work in court.
What's really funny is that somone's already bid $7.00 for it. It's a shame he only has one of them - he could make a lot of money. Or is he just bidding against himself?
Seriously: This type of scam works because subscribers don't understand how the system works. If you advertised a device which will allow you to pay no taxes, everyone would catch on quickly.
Sadly, you'd probably sell a bunch of them. People wouldn't catch on until the IRS came by to visit. For every semi-clueful person out there, there's a tax crank who's saying "Yeah - I'm getting one of these! I told you they had no constitutional right to do that!"
Perhaps, but I was talking about interfaces for dialog boxes. For a dialog that's not going to be resized, specifying coordinates, as long as you don't have to do it by hand, is the way to go. I agree, if you want to be able to resize the window, you need something better. HTML by itself isn't a good tool for precisely positioning things, unless you wanted to use stylesheets, but I think putting that into a window manager would be kinda overkill.
My experience with layout systems has been that they work great if you have three or four things in them, but after that, if you want any kind of layout, you have to put everything in subframes and it gets to be a real mess. I suppose a GUI would have helped, but I don't remember there being one in Tk, and the wxWindows project I worked on already had everything laid out by hand.
I haven't seen Netbeans, but it sounds interesting. Personally, I'd rather lay my dialog out exactly the way I want it to, by dragging around controls and resizing them, rather than diddle around with window.below and layout.add(item, left, top,...) or whatever and hope it comes out the way I intended.
No, dialog boxes are defined in dialog coordinates, which are relative values that are translated to pixels based on the current screen resolution and font size. I agree, this is not layout management, but it's sure as hell not hardcoded pixel coordinates.
Microsoft doesn't believe in layout management mainly because their programming styles haven't really changed since Windows 3.0, or at least Windows 95. Their style is mostly fixed, non-resizeable modal dialogs (which they should be flogged for - overuse of modal dialogs is evil evil evil), so they don't really need it anyway. Truth be told, aside from the resizing, I'd rather design dialogs in the Dialog Editor (or whatever they call it now) than on the fly with Tk/wxWindows/whatever. Yes, I've done it in all three.
Interesting, that. A bunch of years ago I worked on a CD product called "The Doonesbury Anthology", which was a collection of all the Doonesbury strips, with historical context, games, animations, etc. We (i.e. some poor temp slobs) had to scan in all the damn things, many of which were only available from newspaper clippings. There were a few (mostly the early ones) that are missing, mainly like you said, having disappeared into the mists of time.
This was just before the Doonesbury site went up, so those are the same images. Let me tell you, *that* was a hellacious job. Half a dozen scanners going full time, always behind schedule, all on slowass Pentium 90s (this was mid-1995). We had to dig up the strips from a bunch of different places, mainly because, for tax purposes, Garry Trudeau doesn't keep the original drawings (can you imagine what an original Doonesbury is worth?)
It's a shame the company (since assimilated into nothingness) screwed the marketing up so bad - we did two other Doonesbury products that also went thud. Has anybody ever heard of the Doonesbury Screensaver or the Election Game? (Of course, there are good reasons, perhaps. The screensaver didn't work with Windows 95 and the election game was in Visual Basic. Ah well. The comics were cool.)
Yes, but this should be a compile-time error, as opposed to possibly catching in sometime in the field.
Please explain how using whitespace instead of some paired token adds readability, assuming your bracing style is reasonable. To me, having the braces there explicitly shows me that I have a block that starts *here* and ends *here*. Since I use the apparently unique style of having open and close braces in the same column (as opposed to K&R style), I can immedately see the block structure.
That said, I think Python is one of those cool languages I really need to learn some day, as soon as I have a project that I can use it for. And it *is* nice to know that everyone involved at least *has* an indentation policy. I don't suppose you can enforce a tabsize, can you? All the major stylistic wars solved, leaving all you energy available for editor advocacy.
2) Don't worry, no one but Larry Wall and a few other Illuminati really understand Perl. The rest of us just muddle through using the 35% or so of the language that gets 95% of our work done. Yeah, I look at CPAN code and say "Gee, I wish I could do that, whatever that does", but then again, most CPAN code I've seen is almost gratuitously arcane and complex. A few comments on the tricky bits wouldn't hurt anything, guys.
If you wanna learn Perl, I'd suggest getting the Perl Cookbook and browsing through it. I learn a lot of neat, useful tricks that way. The Camel book (Programming Perl) I think is a bit overrated, at least as a teaching book (which I suppose it isn't, really, but it sort of is, too). It's hard to find some things, and a lot of the examples assume you understand the lauguage as well as the authors do.
Still, *I'm* not giving up my copy anytime soon. So don't flame me for heresy.
I had a professor that *loved* APL. I think he was on the board of the APL Foundation or some such. The problem was, any time you came to him with some code that wasn't working right or that you had some question about, his response would be "You know, you can do that in a couple lines of APL" ('that' being a page and a half of Pascal).
I agree, APL was way cool as a language, or so they say. I could never figure any of it out. Then again, I'm no good at cryptograms either, or the Obfuscated C Contest. It's interesting to learn the origins, though. Didn't APL stand for "A Programming Language"?
Where can I get one of those? I need a portable one I can set up in restaurants and movie theaters, not to mention the really high power one for my car...
I agree with all you say here, but why do you have to have wireless? It's a whole lot easier to plug into a phone jack, dial up, and do your thing. If you're lucky, your ISP provides a web-based interface like TWIG. If not, you can always SSH in (you *do* get a shell account from your ISP, right?)
Along your route, I stopped at University of Utah (Salt Lake City), which has a big lab in the library, with wireless. However, you have to be a student to get access. I just used a floppy (remember floppies?) to move stuff from the laptop to a lab machine and did the FTP from there. Or, try unplugging an ether cable from a lab machine and plugging yours in. Might work - it does at University of Vermont (heh heh).
While on campus, try wandering around outside the dorms. I imagine you'll pick up a few access points there.
As for stuff to see, if you're not in a huge rush, take the scenic route across North Dakota and drive through the Teddy Roosevelt National Park, then go south and see Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial (crazyhorse.org, thanks to a previous poster). I cannot say enough about this one - it's about the most awesome sight I've seen. I hit it before Mt. Rushmore (they're about 35 or so miles apart) and it made Rushmore look small and insignificant.
When in Green River, Wyoming, don't forgt to see the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport (along the road to the Flaming Gorge Dam and Recreational Area). Then again, don't bother - it looks like this. The Bonneville Salt Flats are mightily impressive.
One other thing - you will not get a decent cup of coffee until you get to California. When I was in Cheyenne, I drove half an hour out of my way to find a Starbucks. Get a french press (you can get them in plastic - reccomended) and grind up some beans before you leave.
One other other thing - never eat, or even stop, at Stuckeys. Trust me on this.
Other than that, have a great trip, and like others here have said, don't let the tech get in the way of enjoying it.
Ah, I can see you haven't taken I-80 across Nevada. This is, without a doubt, the most godforsaken country I've ever seen, with the possible exception of Oklahoma or Texas. Flat, dead, dry, hot, with no redeeming features except for warehouse-shaped whorehouses and 75 MPH speed limits. The first gives you something to laugh at, the second gets you out of there faster. The primary visual stimuli are the messages alongside the highway, made by piling rocks up. Those are pretty cool. Otherwise, you might as well be on the moon.