Perhaps BASIC is good as a very brief introduction. (Eg. spend a few days on it, and move on as soon as you're vaguely comfortable)
Concepts such as line numbers and GOTO simply don't exist in other languages (or are extremely bad practices if they do). The thought processes that go into learning a BASIC program are somewhat different than what goes into any programming language that's actually in widespread use. (I also have issues with languages that rely on whitespace. It just ain't natural)
Personally, I learned on C++, and although today I would shy away from actually writing a full-fledged application in the language, it was a damn good place to get a start. The concepts that are fundamental to C tend to be present in virtually every other language. It also teaches you to really appreciate those higher level languages for when you don't want to implement quicksort by hand.
If nothing else, C's syntax seems to be the baseline to what all other languages are compared.
Rumor has it that military RF technicians used to irradiate themselves with the maximum PEL(permissible exposure level) of RF radiation to sterilize themselves for the weekend.
Let me be the first to say: You're doing it wrong!
Jesus Christ..... if there was ever a time when that meme was appropriate......
No. The problem is that the HD outputs from the satellite boxes tend to be DRM-encrusted, making it impossible to (legally) use a device such as a TiVo. (Similarly, the Sat companies aren't too keen on a TiVo partnership any more, when they could squeeze more profits by making the boxes themselves)
Cable companies are obligated by the FCC to provide CableCards to any customers that request them, which allows the TiVo to work as the decoder/tuner by itself.
It was reported by a few outlets that Obama's website changed a lot during the political campaign. It would be an interesting application of this technology, to keep a watch on political websites.
Well, I mean..... that was kind of his entire platform:-P
Then I moved to a "right to work" state that didn't have unions. The difference in the level of expertise and professionalism in the faculty was astonishing (thanks to the fact that they were paid shit, mistreated on the job, and not given a voice to object to all this)
Until we figure out how to treat workers fairly without unions, they're still necessary.
Short answer: We can't. We can't really afford anything at this juncture.
Long answer: We can. There are certain things that private industry absolutely sucks at doing. This is simply the federal government stepping in to do for itself what it should've done a long time ago.
I agree that the bailout sucks, though it seems like a necessary evil at this point. (If the banking system fails, we're really fucked.) Instead, try blaming the people who made the whole thing necessary in the first place.
Actually, there was a degree of truth to that story, even though it turned out that the power lines themselves were harmless.
It turned out that the pesticides used to clear the land surrounding the high-voltage lines were carcinogenic, and seeped into the water supply.
Other studies have concluded that any other correlation between childhood cancers and powerlines were either statistical noise, or due to other factors such as the higher likelihood that the lines would be located near industrial residential areas.
There is no guarantee that this will save lives. That's what studies are for. You are confusing cancer detection (or in this case cancer related protein detection) with cancer therapy.
Take two examples now available to detect cancer/cancer related proteins. The first, prostate specific antigen (PSA) is elevated in most cases of prostate cancer. This simple blood test was recommended for all men above a certain age to screen for cancer. However, it does its job too well. It finds cancer in so many men that people started wondering whether finding all of this cancer is a good thing. A lot of men are old enough (and prostate cancer grows slowly enough) that they would certainly have died from other causes without ever having a single symptom of prostate cancer. Additionally, the number of biopsies done to find early cancer (or to find that there was no cancer after all!) combined with the amount of morbidity from current modalities of prostate cancer therapy have led many organizations to conclude that screening for prostate cancer does more harm than good.
A second example comes from the detection of thyroid cancer. Above a certain age, a simple thyroid ultrasound has a fairly good chance of detecting a thyroid nodule. There's a fairly good chance that this nodule will be cancer. However, the risk from dying from this thyroid cancer end up being very low - low enough that the risks from detecting and treating it are higher than the risks of just leaving it be.
When this has been proven to save lives or improve the quality of life of people with asymptomatic cancer, I will join you in criticizing an admittedly slow and often overly burdensome system. But at this point you can't criticize when the device is so far from proven.
But all that doesn't mean we shouldn't go looking for problems (as long as the diagnostic is innocuous in and of itself).
If many cases of Prostate cancer do not result in fatalities due to the disease, we simply need to perform more research to define better criteria for when it is necessary to provide treatment following detection.
(Also, for your two examples against, there are dozens of other cancers that can be cured with an extremely high success rate if caught early, but are virtually guaranteed to be fatal if left until later on.)
Offtopic, but holy crap.... what happened to the pound!? Back when I paid attention to these things, a year ago, that £1.20/minute would have equated to over $2.52/minute USD.
Your opinion would be completely wrong. The federal government does not operate any public education.
Not to be pedantic, but the Federal government is responsible for the operation of the military academies, which could be considered public education.
In response to the rest of your post, I think you could argue that the educational requirements of today are *vastly* different than those of the 1600s. There is a particularly strong argument to be made for funding universities on a national level (sparsely populated states don't tend to have very good public universities, etc.).
Treating the US constitution as scripture is a dangerous practice that its writers would almost certainly have looked down upon. It was written to be fundamentally stable in the long-term, but flexible enough to adapt to the times via amendments.
No. School vouchers are a way of taking money away from public schools, so that the "choice" becomes blindingly obvious, and that those public schools are left to wither and die.
I'm not much of a conspiracy nut, though the motivation behind school vouchers is disgustingly transparent.
Weimar Germany tried something like that. The end result was that their currency became so worthless that people started burning it for heat.
If you give every American $2,884, you simply reduce the value of the dollar by about that much.
In other words, we'd have an inflation crisis on our hands in addition to a receding economy.
If we implemented something like that, I might actually be forced to start following Ron Paul's rants about the gold standard, given its general immunity to...
Actually, private schools consistently get better grade averages because:
1. They select their intake 2. The parents take part in the kids education 3. They can permanently expel disruptive children 4. They can afford to employ the best teachers 5. They can afford to buy better facilities
At my Public (State) school
1. Classes were segregated based upon academic ability. 2. Parents took part in their children's education, wherever applicable (Possibly moreso than the private school down the road, where the students' parents tended to be more obsessed with their careers than their families) 3. We could get rid of children that were legitimately disruptive, or get them special assistance where applicable. 4. The unions kept salaries reasonable. (This varies by state, and generally actually is an issue) 5. We had adequate, albeit spartan facilities. Facilities like the library and science labs were well-maintained.
I have extremely little sympathy for private schools. They're little more than a playground for the wealthy, and a gateway to the Ivy League.
Mac OS X is a BSD variant, so yeah -- It matters a *lot* (I don't have numbers, but I imagine that it's the most prevalent *nix these days...)
Also, BSD is important to maintain, thanks to the extremely liberal license under which it's released. Many applications simply can't be licensed under the GPL. As much as I'd like to be an idealist, closed-source software isn't going to go away anytime soon.
The interstate highway system seems pretty damn good to me.
Do you think that part of the problem could be that the people in power for the past 25+ years have operated on the same ethos as your post? They made the entire "inefficient government" thing into reality, while actually *growing* the size of the bureaucracy.
The private sector has done an abominable job of running the healthcare industry. It's already been demonstrated that the usual laws of Supply & Demand economics do not apply to healthcare.... it's about time we start basing our policy decisions around that.
For better, or for worse, Stalin was *barely* a Communist. Comparing him to Marx is a bit of a stretch. Lenin was arguably the only leader to have faithfully followed Marx's ideas, and didn't live long enough to see how things would have worked out...
One could argue that "pure" Communism creates an inherently unstable government in which the power is quickly usurped by a corrupt dictator, as happened in the USSR after Lenin's death. However, I'm not quite sure this is relevant to the discussion at hand.
The Hitler references, however, are vaguely on-topic, given that we *are* talking about socialism.
As shocking as it may seem to those who have drunk the marketing kool aid
For the love of God, can we please stop using that metaphor? When you think of all that it implies, it's literally sickening...
Filesystem advocacy discussions rarely (if ever) bring up mention of the Holocaust or 9/11. How is it any more appropriate to draw comparisons to the largest mass-suicide in modern history?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps BASIC is good as a very brief introduction. (Eg. spend a few days on it, and move on as soon as you're vaguely comfortable)
Concepts such as line numbers and GOTO simply don't exist in other languages (or are extremely bad practices if they do). The thought processes that go into learning a BASIC program are somewhat different than what goes into any programming language that's actually in widespread use. (I also have issues with languages that rely on whitespace. It just ain't natural)
Personally, I learned on C++, and although today I would shy away from actually writing a full-fledged application in the language, it was a damn good place to get a start. The concepts that are fundamental to C tend to be present in virtually every other language. It also teaches you to really appreciate those higher level languages for when you don't want to implement quicksort by hand.
If nothing else, C's syntax seems to be the baseline to what all other languages are compared.
Yes. However, I believe that the microwave itself may overheat, as all that RF power being generated isn't being absorbed into anything else.
It's generally not advised to run a microwave while empty, or with only dry objects.
Rumor has it that military RF technicians used to irradiate themselves with the maximum PEL(permissible exposure level) of RF radiation to sterilize themselves for the weekend.
Let me be the first to say: You're doing it wrong!
Jesus Christ..... if there was ever a time when that meme was appropriate......
No. The problem is that the HD outputs from the satellite boxes tend to be DRM-encrusted, making it impossible to (legally) use a device such as a TiVo. (Similarly, the Sat companies aren't too keen on a TiVo partnership any more, when they could squeeze more profits by making the boxes themselves)
Cable companies are obligated by the FCC to provide CableCards to any customers that request them, which allows the TiVo to work as the decoder/tuner by itself.
It was reported by a few outlets that Obama's website changed a lot during the political campaign. It would be an interesting application of this technology, to keep a watch on political websites.
Well, I mean..... that was kind of his entire platform :-P
I don't like the teachers' unions.
Then I moved to a "right to work" state that didn't have unions. The difference in the level of expertise and professionalism in the faculty was astonishing (thanks to the fact that they were paid shit, mistreated on the job, and not given a voice to object to all this)
Until we figure out how to treat workers fairly without unions, they're still necessary.
Short answer: We can't. We can't really afford anything at this juncture.
Long answer: We can. There are certain things that private industry absolutely sucks at doing. This is simply the federal government stepping in to do for itself what it should've done a long time ago.
I agree that the bailout sucks, though it seems like a necessary evil at this point. (If the banking system fails, we're really fucked.) Instead, try blaming the people who made the whole thing necessary in the first place.
Actually, there was a degree of truth to that story, even though it turned out that the power lines themselves were harmless.
It turned out that the pesticides used to clear the land surrounding the high-voltage lines were carcinogenic, and seeped into the water supply.
Other studies have concluded that any other correlation between childhood cancers and powerlines were either statistical noise, or due to other factors such as the higher likelihood that the lines would be located near industrial residential areas.
There is no guarantee that this will save lives. That's what studies are for. You are confusing cancer detection (or in this case cancer related protein detection) with cancer therapy.
Take two examples now available to detect cancer/cancer related proteins. The first, prostate specific antigen (PSA) is elevated in most cases of prostate cancer. This simple blood test was recommended for all men above a certain age to screen for cancer. However, it does its job too well. It finds cancer in so many men that people started wondering whether finding all of this cancer is a good thing. A lot of men are old enough (and prostate cancer grows slowly enough) that they would certainly have died from other causes without ever having a single symptom of prostate cancer. Additionally, the number of biopsies done to find early cancer (or to find that there was no cancer after all!) combined with the amount of morbidity from current modalities of prostate cancer therapy have led many organizations to conclude that screening for prostate cancer does more harm than good.
A second example comes from the detection of thyroid cancer. Above a certain age, a simple thyroid ultrasound has a fairly good chance of detecting a thyroid nodule. There's a fairly good chance that this nodule will be cancer. However, the risk from dying from this thyroid cancer end up being very low - low enough that the risks from detecting and treating it are higher than the risks of just leaving it be.
When this has been proven to save lives or improve the quality of life of people with asymptomatic cancer, I will join you in criticizing an admittedly slow and often overly burdensome system. But at this point you can't criticize when the device is so far from proven.
But all that doesn't mean we shouldn't go looking for problems (as long as the diagnostic is innocuous in and of itself).
If many cases of Prostate cancer do not result in fatalities due to the disease, we simply need to perform more research to define better criteria for when it is necessary to provide treatment following detection.
(Also, for your two examples against, there are dozens of other cancers that can be cured with an extremely high success rate if caught early, but are virtually guaranteed to be fatal if left until later on.)
The only sort of "control" that should be allowed is the enforcement of network neutrality.
£1.20/minute (or over $1.75/minute
Offtopic, but holy crap.... what happened to the pound!? Back when I paid attention to these things, a year ago, that £1.20/minute would have equated to over $2.52/minute USD.
This is one case where truth is stranger than fiction.
There was a textbook manufacturer that got in trouble for doing exactly that.
Apparently many of the major brands switch to sugar during the few weeks before Passover.
Your opinion would be completely wrong. The federal government does not operate any public education.
Not to be pedantic, but the Federal government is responsible for the operation of the military academies, which could be considered public education.
In response to the rest of your post, I think you could argue that the educational requirements of today are *vastly* different than those of the 1600s. There is a particularly strong argument to be made for funding universities on a national level (sparsely populated states don't tend to have very good public universities, etc.).
Treating the US constitution as scripture is a dangerous practice that its writers would almost certainly have looked down upon. It was written to be fundamentally stable in the long-term, but flexible enough to adapt to the times via amendments.
No. School vouchers are a way of taking money away from public schools, so that the "choice" becomes blindingly obvious, and that those public schools are left to wither and die.
I'm not much of a conspiracy nut, though the motivation behind school vouchers is disgustingly transparent.
we'reeeeee goiiiiiinnnnng the wrong waaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy!
Weimar Germany tried something like that. The end result was that their currency became so worthless that people started burning it for heat.
If you give every American $2,884, you simply reduce the value of the dollar by about that much.
In other words, we'd have an inflation crisis on our hands in addition to a receding economy.
If we implemented something like that, I might actually be forced to start following Ron Paul's rants about the gold standard, given its general immunity to ...
Actually, private schools consistently get better grade averages because:
1. They select their intake
2. The parents take part in the kids education
3. They can permanently expel disruptive children
4. They can afford to employ the best teachers
5. They can afford to buy better facilities
At my Public (State) school
1. Classes were segregated based upon academic ability.
2. Parents took part in their children's education, wherever applicable (Possibly moreso than the private school down the road, where the students' parents tended to be more obsessed with their careers than their families)
3. We could get rid of children that were legitimately disruptive, or get them special assistance where applicable.
4. The unions kept salaries reasonable. (This varies by state, and generally actually is an issue)
5. We had adequate, albeit spartan facilities. Facilities like the library and science labs were well-maintained.
I have extremely little sympathy for private schools. They're little more than a playground for the wealthy, and a gateway to the Ivy League.
To clear up something that is probably annoying the heck out of our US readers:
UK Public School = US Private School
UK State School = US Public School
(Search Google for a full history of why this terminology got adopted. I'd explain it here, but it's really not that interesting.)
....Given history, France's paranoia may be well-justified in this regard...
Mac OS X is a BSD variant, so yeah -- It matters a *lot* (I don't have numbers, but I imagine that it's the most prevalent *nix these days...)
Also, BSD is important to maintain, thanks to the extremely liberal license under which it's released. Many applications simply can't be licensed under the GPL. As much as I'd like to be an idealist, closed-source software isn't going to go away anytime soon.
Seriously.
The EMACS source tree is 38MB compressed. The Linux kernel is 48MB (much of which never gets compiled into actual production kernels)
The interstate highway system seems pretty damn good to me.
Do you think that part of the problem could be that the people in power for the past 25+ years have operated on the same ethos as your post? They made the entire "inefficient government" thing into reality, while actually *growing* the size of the bureaucracy.
The private sector has done an abominable job of running the healthcare industry. It's already been demonstrated that the usual laws of Supply & Demand economics do not apply to healthcare.... it's about time we start basing our policy decisions around that.
For better, or for worse, Stalin was *barely* a Communist. Comparing him to Marx is a bit of a stretch. Lenin was arguably the only leader to have faithfully followed Marx's ideas, and didn't live long enough to see how things would have worked out...
One could argue that "pure" Communism creates an inherently unstable government in which the power is quickly usurped by a corrupt dictator, as happened in the USSR after Lenin's death. However, I'm not quite sure this is relevant to the discussion at hand.
The Hitler references, however, are vaguely on-topic, given that we *are* talking about socialism.
As shocking as it may seem to those who have drunk the marketing kool aid
For the love of God, can we please stop using that metaphor? When you think of all that it implies, it's literally sickening...
Filesystem advocacy discussions rarely (if ever) bring up mention of the Holocaust or 9/11. How is it any more appropriate to draw comparisons to the largest mass-suicide in modern history?