I'd say pascal first as an introductory programming course, then C, then some assembly, then finally C++ or Java.
It's a lot easier to learn sequential programming when you're not busy shooting yourself in the foot... let them hit C after they know what a conditional and a loop are:) Not sure where you'd want to throw in a scripting language; or if it's even really neccessary... what skill do you learn from learning a scripting language other than the language itself?
If you propose the existance of an all-powerful god... then the point isn't that it is impossible to disprove its existance, the point is that you've just postualated the existance of a being whose existance is impossible to prove by ANY means! The only way to prove the existance of an all-powerful god would be if the being wanted you to do so.
This is a situation beyond the domain of science. As such to make a decision regarding the existance of god is to blindly make your decision based on faith. Without any faith in your decision you would be locked in indecision. To state the you believe that there is no god, is to state that you have made a decision.
I have yet to come to a decision regarding if black holes transfer matter from one universe to another. I have yet to come to a decision regarding the existance of microbes in sulfuric vents on other planets. Yet, unlike the question regarding gods existance, these questions and others are ameniable to science. We can create testable hypothesis.
"Furthermore your allowing your self to "just believe" means in some cases you are willing to abandon scientific method in favor of faith. How do you decide when to apply logic and when to apply faith? When you choose to apply faith how can you be sure you decided correctly with out running any experiments to check your hypothesis?"
When the decision to be made is one in which the scientific method is inherently unable to be applied.
And you never know that you decided correctly. That's why it's faith.
It's also why I don't attempt to convince those who are undecided or disbelievers to believe. There's no point in making the attempt, there's no reason I or anyone else can give to make one reason over another, and there's no way for us to know if we're even right in the first place.
However, that doesn't mean that I don't try to convince disbelievers that they made a decision regarding the same question I did... and that the question is one that requires faith in order to make the decision... regardless of which decision is made:)
As for my choice, I sat on the fence for most of my life, and only have recently moved off. Why did I finally choose to take a stance? Because I finally realized it was an inherently insoluable problem and at that point not making a choice was something of a choice in itself.
Strange, you rant about faith, yet you evidently have a very strong faith that there is no god... it isn't exactly a supposition that can be proven. Despite what christian nutjobs say, science can't prove (nor disprove) the existance of a god. You're not critically thinking, and are placing your beliefs above logic, which incidently is what you seem to have a problem with religious people doing.
Myself, I'm an agnostic who believes in god. However, I don't see how my belief interfers with the findings of science in any way. The two concepts can coexist without any problems. I know that I certainly don't have a problem applying the scientific method on a day-to-day basis, or believing that evolution is the theory which best explains what we've observed. Perhaps you could explain why I must reject science if I believe in God?
The school had until very very recently (ie, '06 I think) had the standard practice of using SSNs as student IDs and made it a rather difficult prolonged process to get an alternative ID (I know, I tried, I gave up). This would be why SSNs are included in the stolen records. Blame the school in this case, not the prof.
Additionally, from my understanding, professors are supposed to be keeping grades for at least 5 years following the course. So again blame the school, (or the state, or feds or whoever).
The data should have been encrypted though. Knowing the prof, I'm really surprised that it wasn't, as he was one of the profs that I really respected.
As for the schools response? Very shortly after the theft they had the local news stations make announcements regarding the theft and directing affected people to thier online information and assistance, then they sent out letters to every individual affected.
I would hope that the school would implement policies that would ensure that all future data will be stored encryped for the future though. No mention of anything yay or nay along these lines though. However, they have provided more in the way of help dealing with the situation than many of the data theft situations we've heard about in the recent past.
As for the person making the post... he sounds like someone that has something against the prof and is abusing slashdot:/ I mean, "The lecturer in question is one of the CS faculty at UTA who all conveniently guarded one another"... seriously... this is a little bit too tin-foil hattish; and complaining that he didn't give a comment to (a rather bad) school paper as a reason to publically shun him?
My personal opinion after having had this prof for 3 courses, is that if any prof would have worked hard to make sure that students were notified and a proper followup was taken it would have been him. I have a lot of respect for the guy. He's one of the few profs I've had in my 7 years of schooling that really knew his material, admitted when he didn't know something, and treated his students with respect.
You can't eliminate sources of fraud. What you can do however is make fraud detectable.
An electronic voting machine that prints out a voter-verifiable paper record makes electronic fraud detectable.
Once fraud is detected, then steps can be taken to correct it or at least identify the attack vector and remedy it in the future.
However, if there isn't a method for showing that a machine is casting fraudulent votes, then, well, we have no way of knowing if there even is a problem. Which is where we're at now.
And you propose to have women prove that they used a contraceptive how? I don't think that state sponsered CCTV cameras in everyone's bedroom would go over too well. (although... if you've got nothing to hide...)
Without some way to prove/disprove the contraceptive use, you've effectively set up a meaningless system where anyone that's willing to lie under oath (in a lie that they can't be caught at) will be able to get an abortion.
Now, for a solution that makes noone happy, but might actually work. Let the anti-abortionites sign up for an "I'm willing to adopt list". If a woman goes for an abortion, and there's a name on that list, then she carriest he baby to term and the name on the list gets the kid and is taken off. If there isn't a name on that list, then, well, the public obviously doesn't care enough, and the abortion is allowed to happen.
The best part is that it makes absolutely noone happy, so it must be a good compromise!:)
Have you considered just setting the receiver down instead of hanging up? For every person that does that it's at least 1 fewer person that gets called that day.
"And I'd just like to add....who in the hell gave Leo Burnett the right to resize my browser window?"
You might try a different browser that gives you the ability to have javascript enabled... but not the bits that let the page author move/resize/gain focus/etc. I know Opera gives you this level of control (Tools->Preferences->Advanced->Content->JavaScript options), I dunno about FireFox. Browsing where you're in control and not the site you visit is nice:)
And on another note.. Leo Burnett's site... I agree with Lazare, that thing is a pain to navigate.
So it's a system that's targeted at making sure the police can decrypt the files of...
1) People that're innocent. 2) People accused of something relatively innocuous.
If it's anything serious, then the offender is going to say... hm... I'll receive 5 years for not giving them my decryption key, or 50 if I do. Lets think about that one a long time...
The sad part here is that if a public cry ever arose about this that we'd see the penalty changed to be life instead of 5 years...:/
On a related question, can y'all be sent to prison for failing to testify against yourself? I'm really not seeing how this is different?
That's how I read it as well... now, with that assumption the OP might want to take a look at Jonathan Coulton's site http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
He offers some of his songs as free mp3 downloads available to anyone, then lets you pay to download the rest (still as mp3s!). While I can't say how his purchase system works (as I haven't yet bought any... although lately throwing $60 his way has been rather tempting...), I can't imagine that he's going to have it set up so he's providing people with static links that can be spread around.
Then there are sites such as magnatune, http://www.magnatune.com/ that the OP may want to look at as well. I seem to remember there being a listing on wikipedia of music download stores of various types, that may help him find more sites along the lines of magnatune.
I find that I don't have the motivation to a new language or programming style by working on trivial projects. However, I find that if I find a project with significant scope to work on, then I have more motivation to work on it.
"I hope they have a nice animation for when the machine is infected with a virus, like clippy catching fire and then running around in circles screaming."
I'd be infecting my computer on purpose if that was the result!
So you're aware, the video shows 4 "fingers", arranged with each at a 90 degree offset to the other. So in a sense you do have a palm (the area that the 4 fingers are mouonted around)
However I do have an issue with information about what I use my computer for (even when I'm NOT playing the game!) being gathered!
If they want to serve me in-game ads... well... blizzard's been doing that for years with Diablo 2 (well when you're on battlenet in-between games at least) and you haven't seen any firestorm of complaints raised there.
It's not the in-game ad issue that ticks me off, it's the spyware.
Letsee I can: A) Spend $50, and get loaded with spyware reporting my porn habits to the highest bidder. B) Spend nothing and I don't get infested with spyware.
There's a reason I don't have anything from an ISP installed on my computer.
In the cases where you supposedly have to install thier software in order to register an account, I'll call up tech support and pester them for a while. Every once in a long while that'll work and I'll manage to avoid installing crap. When it doesn't... well.. I at least cost the ISP money. If I have to install, then I'll image, install, create my account, thwn restore from my image.
But... I'm sadly one of a tiny minority. Even if there was only a decently sized minority (20-30%), calling in and complaining about having to install software, then you'd probably see a change in behavior by the ISPs to make it optional, and make it apparent that it's optional. (although they'd still claim that this software was the greatest thing since sliced bread though...)
I'm with ya. I don't own a DVD player, and thus watch DVDs on my computer. I probably purchase a few dozen DVDs a year... and as soon as I start getting DVDs that won't play on my computer I'm going to first attempt returning them and raising a huge fuss with the store, and if that fails, then I'll simply stop buying anything released domestically... and I'll get on the bittorrent bandwagon.
Back in 2000 or so I got a decent amount of ICQ spam. Haven't gotten any in a long long time though... and I've kept the same number. Don't recieve any on my AIM or MSN accounts either... although I didn't have those until recently.
If it matters, I'm a trillian user.
I don't think any of my online friends get much if any IM spam either. The problem seems to have fixed itself over the years.
And... you missed out on all the things that you can *gasp* LEARN from playing games!
Over the past few years I've had some interesting chats with my parents about it. (I'm 27 in case that matters to you)
Their take on my gaming was that when I first got into it they were really worried about how much time I was wasting on worthless pursuits. However, they let me do as I wished as long as I wasn't screwing up school too badly. I did have grades bomb some due to not doing homework... but then... I wouldn't have done the homework anyways XD
Anyways, as time went on, they realized that I was learning stuff from the games. I was learning how to allocate limited resources. I was learning how to formulate a plan, implement it, and adapt it to events as they happened. I was learning how to think and solve problems.
When I got into an online massively multiplayer text-based game, and involved with the leadership of a 300-400 member alliance, they were amazed at the political skills I picked up. (I spent a couple of years negotiating pacts with other alliances and dealing with the results when people broke them) My dad envies me that experience, because I'm evidently maneuvering the political scene at work waaay better than he did when he was fresh outta school. The same massively multiplayer game also taught me leadership skills... try getting 150 volunteers in an IRC chat to act in sync. It'll teach you how to lead and not just boss.
Hell, I learned time management out of making it a priority to find time to game. I set-aside gaming time each day and gamed regardless of schoolwork. Amazingly, despite gaming probably 20 hours a week on average I graduated with a 3.5+ GPA
There's a lot to learn from gaming that you're not going to find taught in any class. Too many people seem to focus only on the downside of gaming, and not on the what it offers.
I haven't read the study... like you I don't know where it's at.
I will admit that my motivation behind poking at this is due to it not matching what I believe, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of facts; you are correct, I had misread, the study was comparing computer users to computer users.
However, I'm still poking at it...:)
For instance, I'm questioning the assumption that "the motivation to buy other things instead of CDs was the same in 2001 as in 2002" This seems to be an unfounded assumption. The average consumer did not necessarily view the relative worth of CDs to other forms of entertainment as staying the same. The point I made about computer ownership opening other forms of entertainment up is still valid. As an example lets take computer games. If the average consumer changes his/her balance of the relative worth of CDs versus computer games in favor of games (and video gaming acceptance in American culture has been on the rise...), then you will see computer-owning consumers spend more on video games and less on music. However the computer-less consumer won't, as the computer game holds no value to them. Thus you'll see computer owners spend less on music than previously and computer-less consumers spend the same.
Or this may well be related to people with computers downloading music... however the point is that we don't know which of these it is, or if it's something else entirely.
In other news the RIAA has sued Microsoft for stealing thier business as computer owners spent more money on microsoft products than non computer owners... and this obviously means they have less money to spend on CDs and must pirate instead! It's all Microsofts fault!
On a more serious note, how could they seriously not realize that owning a computer opens up new entertainment mediums to people? 1 computer game is 2-5 CDs... it's not like people have a limitless supply of entertainment money.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... but does the script he liked have Wisconsin Platt in it?
Hmm...
:) Not sure where you'd want to throw in a scripting language; or if it's even really neccessary... what skill do you learn from learning a scripting language other than the language itself?
I'd say pascal first as an introductory programming course, then C, then some assembly, then finally C++ or Java.
It's a lot easier to learn sequential programming when you're not busy shooting yourself in the foot... let them hit C after they know what a conditional and a loop are
I would assume because he's giving a presentation or hooked up to a larger monitor.
If you propose the existance of an all-powerful god... then the point isn't that it is impossible to disprove its existance, the point is that you've just postualated the existance of a being whose existance is impossible to prove by ANY means! The only way to prove the existance of an all-powerful god would be if the being wanted you to do so.
:)
This is a situation beyond the domain of science. As such to make a decision regarding the existance of god is to blindly make your decision based on faith. Without any faith in your decision you would be locked in indecision. To state the you believe that there is no god, is to state that you have made a decision.
I have yet to come to a decision regarding if black holes transfer matter from one universe to another. I have yet to come to a decision regarding the existance of microbes in sulfuric vents on other planets. Yet, unlike the question regarding gods existance, these questions and others are ameniable to science. We can create testable hypothesis.
"Furthermore your allowing your self to "just believe" means in some cases you are willing to abandon scientific method in favor of faith. How do you decide when to apply logic and when to apply faith? When you choose to apply faith how can you be sure you decided correctly with out running any experiments to check your hypothesis?"
When the decision to be made is one in which the scientific method is inherently unable to be applied.
And you never know that you decided correctly. That's why it's faith.
It's also why I don't attempt to convince those who are undecided or disbelievers to believe. There's no point in making the attempt, there's no reason I or anyone else can give to make one reason over another, and there's no way for us to know if we're even right in the first place.
However, that doesn't mean that I don't try to convince disbelievers that they made a decision regarding the same question I did... and that the question is one that requires faith in order to make the decision... regardless of which decision is made
As for my choice, I sat on the fence for most of my life, and only have recently moved off. Why did I finally choose to take a stance? Because I finally realized it was an inherently insoluable problem and at that point not making a choice was something of a choice in itself.
Strange, you rant about faith, yet you evidently have a very strong faith that there is no god... it isn't exactly a supposition that can be proven. Despite what christian nutjobs say, science can't prove (nor disprove) the existance of a god. You're not critically thinking, and are placing your beliefs above logic, which incidently is what you seem to have a problem with religious people doing.
Myself, I'm an agnostic who believes in god. However, I don't see how my belief interfers with the findings of science in any way. The two concepts can coexist without any problems. I know that I certainly don't have a problem applying the scientific method on a day-to-day basis, or believing that evolution is the theory which best explains what we've observed. Perhaps you could explain why I must reject science if I believe in God?
I attended this school and had this professor.
:/ I mean, "The lecturer in question is one of the CS faculty at UTA who all conveniently guarded one another"... seriously... this is a little bit too tin-foil hattish; and complaining that he didn't give a comment to (a rather bad) school paper as a reason to publically shun him?
Anyways, to address your concerns...
The school had until very very recently (ie, '06 I think) had the standard practice of using SSNs as student IDs and made it a rather difficult prolonged process to get an alternative ID (I know, I tried, I gave up). This would be why SSNs are included in the stolen records. Blame the school in this case, not the prof.
Additionally, from my understanding, professors are supposed to be keeping grades for at least 5 years following the course. So again blame the school, (or the state, or feds or whoever).
The data should have been encrypted though. Knowing the prof, I'm really surprised that it wasn't, as he was one of the profs that I really respected.
As for the schools response? Very shortly after the theft they had the local news stations make announcements regarding the theft and directing affected people to thier online information and assistance, then they sent out letters to every individual affected.
I would hope that the school would implement policies that would ensure that all future data will be stored encryped for the future though. No mention of anything yay or nay along these lines though. However, they have provided more in the way of help dealing with the situation than many of the data theft situations we've heard about in the recent past.
As for the person making the post... he sounds like someone that has something against the prof and is abusing slashdot
My personal opinion after having had this prof for 3 courses, is that if any prof would have worked hard to make sure that students were notified and a proper followup was taken it would have been him. I have a lot of respect for the guy. He's one of the few profs I've had in my 7 years of schooling that really knew his material, admitted when he didn't know something, and treated his students with respect.
You can't eliminate sources of fraud. What you can do however is make fraud detectable.
An electronic voting machine that prints out a voter-verifiable paper record makes electronic fraud detectable.
Once fraud is detected, then steps can be taken to correct it or at least identify the attack vector and remedy it in the future.
However, if there isn't a method for showing that a machine is casting fraudulent votes, then, well, we have no way of knowing if there even is a problem. Which is where we're at now.
And you propose to have women prove that they used a contraceptive how? I don't think that state sponsered CCTV cameras in everyone's bedroom would go over too well. (although... if you've got nothing to hide...)
:)
Without some way to prove/disprove the contraceptive use, you've effectively set up a meaningless system where anyone that's willing to lie under oath (in a lie that they can't be caught at) will be able to get an abortion.
Now, for a solution that makes noone happy, but might actually work. Let the anti-abortionites sign up for an "I'm willing to adopt list". If a woman goes for an abortion, and there's a name on that list, then she carriest he baby to term and the name on the list gets the kid and is taken off. If there isn't a name on that list, then, well, the public obviously doesn't care enough, and the abortion is allowed to happen.
The best part is that it makes absolutely noone happy, so it must be a good compromise!
Have you considered just setting the receiver down instead of hanging up? For every person that does that it's at least 1 fewer person that gets called that day.
Just a thought.
"And I'd just like to add....who in the hell gave Leo Burnett the right to resize my browser window?"
t options), I dunno about FireFox. Browsing where you're in control and not the site you visit is nice :)
You might try a different browser that gives you the ability to have javascript enabled... but not the bits that let the page author move/resize/gain focus/etc. I know Opera gives you this level of control (Tools->Preferences->Advanced->Content->JavaScrip
And on another note.. Leo Burnett's site... I agree with Lazare, that thing is a pain to navigate.
So it's a system that's targeted at making sure the police can decrypt the files of...
:/
1) People that're innocent.
2) People accused of something relatively innocuous.
If it's anything serious, then the offender is going to say... hm... I'll receive 5 years for not giving them my decryption key, or 50 if I do. Lets think about that one a long time...
The sad part here is that if a public cry ever arose about this that we'd see the penalty changed to be life instead of 5 years...
On a related question, can y'all be sent to prison for failing to testify against yourself? I'm really not seeing how this is different?
That's how I read it as well... now, with that assumption the OP might want to take a look at Jonathan Coulton's site http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
He offers some of his songs as free mp3 downloads available to anyone, then lets you pay to download the rest (still as mp3s!). While I can't say how his purchase system works (as I haven't yet bought any... although lately throwing $60 his way has been rather tempting...), I can't imagine that he's going to have it set up so he's providing people with static links that can be spread around.
Then there are sites such as magnatune, http://www.magnatune.com/ that the OP may want to look at as well. I seem to remember there being a listing on wikipedia of music download stores of various types, that may help him find more sites along the lines of magnatune.
I find that I don't have the motivation to a new language or programming style by working on trivial projects. However, I find that if I find a project with significant scope to work on, then I have more motivation to work on it.
"No question always demands an absolute yes or no answer"
:)
Yes all questions do!
"I hope they have a nice animation for when the machine is infected with a virus, like clippy catching fire and then running around in circles screaming."
I'd be infecting my computer on purpose if that was the result!
So you're aware, the video shows 4 "fingers", arranged with each at a 90 degree offset to the other. So in a sense you do have a palm (the area that the 4 fingers are mouonted around)
And neither do I...
However I do have an issue with information about what I use my computer for (even when I'm NOT playing the game!) being gathered!
If they want to serve me in-game ads... well... blizzard's been doing that for years with Diablo 2 (well when you're on battlenet in-between games at least) and you haven't seen any firestorm of complaints raised there.
It's not the in-game ad issue that ticks me off, it's the spyware.
Wonder how much impetus this'll give to piracy?
Letsee I can:
A) Spend $50, and get loaded with spyware reporting my porn habits to the highest bidder.
B) Spend nothing and I don't get infested with spyware.
It's not just about the money anymore... XD
There's a reason I don't have anything from an ISP installed on my computer.
In the cases where you supposedly have to install thier software in order to register an account, I'll call up tech support and pester them for a while. Every once in a long while that'll work and I'll manage to avoid installing crap. When it doesn't... well.. I at least cost the ISP money. If I have to install, then I'll image, install, create my account, thwn restore from my image.
But... I'm sadly one of a tiny minority. Even if there was only a decently sized minority (20-30%), calling in and complaining about having to install software, then you'd probably see a change in behavior by the ISPs to make it optional, and make it apparent that it's optional. (although they'd still claim that this software was the greatest thing since sliced bread though...)
I'm with ya. I don't own a DVD player, and thus watch DVDs on my computer. I probably purchase a few dozen DVDs a year... and as soon as I start getting DVDs that won't play on my computer I'm going to first attempt returning them and raising a huge fuss with the store, and if that fails, then I'll simply stop buying anything released domestically... and I'll get on the bittorrent bandwagon.
It amazes me how stupid copyright holders can be.
Back in 2000 or so I got a decent amount of ICQ spam. Haven't gotten any in a long long time though... and I've kept the same number. Don't recieve any on my AIM or MSN accounts either... although I didn't have those until recently.
If it matters, I'm a trillian user.
I don't think any of my online friends get much if any IM spam either. The problem seems to have fixed itself over the years.
And... you missed out on all the things that you can *gasp* LEARN from playing games!
Over the past few years I've had some interesting chats with my parents about it. (I'm 27 in case that matters to you)
Their take on my gaming was that when I first got into it they were really worried about how much time I was wasting on worthless pursuits. However, they let me do as I wished as long as I wasn't screwing up school too badly. I did have grades bomb some due to not doing homework... but then... I wouldn't have done the homework anyways XD
Anyways, as time went on, they realized that I was learning stuff from the games. I was learning how to allocate limited resources. I was learning how to formulate a plan, implement it, and adapt it to events as they happened. I was learning how to think and solve problems.
When I got into an online massively multiplayer text-based game, and involved with the leadership of a 300-400 member alliance, they were amazed at the political skills I picked up. (I spent a couple of years negotiating pacts with other alliances and dealing with the results when people broke them) My dad envies me that experience, because I'm evidently maneuvering the political scene at work waaay better than he did when he was fresh outta school. The same massively multiplayer game also taught me leadership skills... try getting 150 volunteers in an IRC chat to act in sync. It'll teach you how to lead and not just boss.
Hell, I learned time management out of making it a priority to find time to game. I set-aside gaming time each day and gamed regardless of schoolwork. Amazingly, despite gaming probably 20 hours a week on average I graduated with a 3.5+ GPA
There's a lot to learn from gaming that you're not going to find taught in any class. Too many people seem to focus only on the downside of gaming, and not on the what it offers.
I haven't read the study... like you I don't know where it's at.
:)
I will admit that my motivation behind poking at this is due to it not matching what I believe, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of facts; you are correct, I had misread, the study was comparing computer users to computer users.
However, I'm still poking at it...
For instance, I'm questioning the assumption that "the motivation to buy other things instead of CDs was the same in 2001 as in 2002" This seems to be an unfounded assumption. The average consumer did not necessarily view the relative worth of CDs to other forms of entertainment as staying the same. The point I made about computer ownership opening other forms of entertainment up is still valid. As an example lets take computer games. If the average consumer changes his/her balance of the relative worth of CDs versus computer games in favor of games (and video gaming acceptance in American culture has been on the rise...), then you will see computer-owning consumers spend more on video games and less on music. However the computer-less consumer won't, as the computer game holds no value to them. Thus you'll see computer owners spend less on music than previously and computer-less consumers spend the same.
Or this may well be related to people with computers downloading music... however the point is that we don't know which of these it is, or if it's something else entirely.
In other news the RIAA has sued Microsoft for stealing thier business as computer owners spent more money on microsoft products than non computer owners... and this obviously means they have less money to spend on CDs and must pirate instead! It's all Microsofts fault!
On a more serious note, how could they seriously not realize that owning a computer opens up new entertainment mediums to people? 1 computer game is 2-5 CDs... it's not like people have a limitless supply of entertainment money.
Gotta love bad studies...
We've already got this around where I live. Reliant (and maybe others) will sell you electricity generated almost entirely from clean sources.
Or are you talking about cleaner in terms of spikes and such?