"C and C++ need to be taught, but they should be in a Junior level course."
I learned C++ in high school. On a Mac, too, using Codewarrior. This was my second language, after VB, which I taught myself. I found it pretty straightforward.
Personally, I would NOT teach Java as an intro to OOP, instead I would teach C++. Why?
1) Look at what each language is (for the most part) being used for. Java - little web games. C++ - 90% or so of all commercial applications.
2) Java applications don't even run stand-alone. They need a clunky, slow-loading interpreter.
If you read the article, you'll notice that the biggest uses for the ebooks so far are reference databases, and things that are at most only a few pages long, like bibliographies, and newspaper and magazine articles. Not actual books that are read sequentially.
This is because these things are simply not as convenient and not as user-friendly as books. I can't possibly imagine looking at a Palm Pilot screen for four hours straight. It's simply too much of an eyestrain, and it's too dim to see in the sun.
Precisely. One more hyper-capitalistic step towards dehumanization.
Perhaps fifty years in the future, there will be an "underground" organization of people who read real books instead of e-books. In addition, They will constantly be guerrilla-fighting with police forces, and, of course, Hacking The Mainframe. In fact, I think I'll write a science-fiction novel about this!
Whether they work or no, we can't ignore the fact that stealth aircraft go for about 2 billion apiece. That's A LOT of money. The US Military needs to scale back drastically, but still retain the ability to fight. I say the future is in guerilla commando operations.
Most hard drive platters are composed of either aluminium alloy or a mixture of glass and ceramic. The latter of these could be ground into powder, mixed with water, dried, and fired in a kiln.
Nah. The kids will never take these "educational opportunities". 99.9% of them would prefer to cut class, horse around, make drug deals, or at best, use the classroom computers to check their Hotmail. This is exactly what goes on during Computer Science class at my high school, and it is considered the most "academically elite" school in a city of 1.5 million.
Soviet education was at least an order of magnitude superior to American education.
...also, I failed to mention that portscanning should not be treated the same way as stealing from a store, because it is not the same at all. It is perhaps equivalent to looking around the store to see if there are any surveillance devices. As far as I know, looking around when you are in a store is perfectly legal. There are no security guards in every aisle saying "nothing to see here, move along."
Once you get a-thinking like that, you're going down a slippery slope to an increasingly fugitive mentality.
If port scanning is a right (a question I'll leave to others to address), then it must be protected, as all rights must be protected. If you allow it to be made illegal, rationalizing that it'll usually be overlooked by law enforcement anyway, you're putting yourself at the mercy of chance, making yourself a fugitive, rather than standing on solid ground and claiming what's justly yours.
...And don't think that no one has ever been arrested for "stealing a 5 cent bazooka gum from your neighborhood grocery store's bulk candy section".
We're having McVeigh's execution televised. Execution as entertainment is the ultimate in reality TV, it's also fucking sick and the downfall of all that is supposed to be called human.
IMHO, an interesting path of development this technology might follow is the advent of really giant airships, maybe ten miles long, carrying domed cities on top. They would stay in the air permanently and the inhabitants could spend all of their lives drifting around the globe.
IMHO, neither the University of Utah, nor anyone else, has any business whatsoever preventing open political discussion in a public forum.
That site was not UoU's intellectual property; it was no one's intellectual property. It is its own property; information is free. Those who opress information opress people; they are the proverbial bookburners. Their treacherous work is that of trying to dim the bright lights of human intellect. In the end, they will fail.
Meanwhile, I know what university I definitely will not be applying to come next fall...
Maybe the problem is that our calendar is simply too complicated. Why on earth are we using the Gregorian calendar, anyway? It would be far simpler to use a dating convention that has, let's say, 10 months per year, 10 days per month, 10 hours per day, and 10 minutes per hour. Better yet, we do not even have to name the units. Year = e0. Month = e-1. Day = e-2. Hour = e-3. Minute = e-4. Dates and times could then be represented easily by a single decimal. For example, 5.072 would 5th year, 0th month, 7th day, 2nd hour.
Ah, but if this did not happen, then Voyager would still be 26 years away from Earth. Therefore, the 26-year-later Janeway would go back in time and help the crew get home.
You can probably see the circular reasoning that develops when you involve time travel in a plot. It's just an easy way out, and it ruins otherwise good sci-fi.
As for the guns, I remember my grandpa telling me stories about how the SS would go after the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, unfortunately they had guns and 20000 of our SS brothers were killed by the subhumans before we blew them up with artillery.
I wish the Jews had resisted, like you claim they did. It would have served the Nazis right. Unfortunately, this account is blatantly false, and a historical impossibility.
The Jews' rights were taken away not all of a sudden, but little by little, first the "less significant" rights, then the more basic ones. Which do you think would happen first: banning of firearms, or forced relocation to ghettos?
Dehumanizing? Nah. If anything, it's a nice, early eye opener to the real world. A world in which the cops are watching you drive, the convience store is taping you, and your boss is looking over your shoulder, watching you work, and judging how much you make based upon what you do.
You talk about this as if it is a good thing. As if there's nothing wrong with turning kids into complacent little cynics as early as possible.
Instead of acclimating kids to all the things that are wrong with the world, I believe we should make them into idealistic people who will be appalled (rightfully so) at "a world in which the cops are watching you drive, the convience store is taping you, and your boss is looking over your shoulder", and will change their world for the better, or at least dedicate their energy to trying to do so.
We have a choice in what values we instill into our kids. We can train them to be complacent parts in the machine. Or we can make them idealistic, intelligent, imaginative, forward-thinking social revolutionaries who will be aware of themselves and of the world around them, and who will work to change society for the better!
Slashdot Mirror
"C and C++ need to be taught, but they should be in a Junior level course."
I learned C++ in high school. On a Mac, too, using Codewarrior. This was my second language, after VB, which I taught myself. I found it pretty straightforward.
Personally, I would NOT teach Java as an intro to OOP, instead I would teach C++. Why?
1) Look at what each language is (for the most part) being used for. Java - little web games. C++ - 90% or so of all commercial applications.
2) Java applications don't even run stand-alone. They need a clunky, slow-loading interpreter.
"overcompensation".
If you read the article, you'll notice that the biggest uses for the ebooks so far are reference databases, and things that are at most only a few pages long, like bibliographies, and newspaper and magazine articles. Not actual books that are read sequentially.
This is because these things are simply not as convenient and not as user-friendly as books. I can't possibly imagine looking at a Palm Pilot screen for four hours straight. It's simply too much of an eyestrain, and it's too dim to see in the sun.
What? How dare he. It's not IN AD 2101 yet...
What? How dare he. It's not In AD 2101 yet...
What's wrong with the idea of simply putting a solid-fuel rocket on the back of, let's say, a LearJet?
Do you have any idea what kind of lift capacity this would take?!
Precisely. One more hyper-capitalistic step towards dehumanization.
Perhaps fifty years in the future, there will be an "underground" organization of people who read real books instead of e-books. In addition, They will constantly be guerrilla-fighting with police forces, and, of course, Hacking The Mainframe. In fact, I think I'll write a science-fiction novel about this!
Whether they work or no, we can't ignore the fact that stealth aircraft go for about 2 billion apiece. That's A LOT of money. The US Military needs to scale back drastically, but still retain the ability to fight. I say the future is in guerilla commando operations.
Again, a false analogy. Port scanning != password sniffing.
Most hard drive platters are composed of either aluminium alloy or a mixture of glass and ceramic. The latter of these could be ground into powder, mixed with water, dried, and fired in a kiln.
Nah. The kids will never take these "educational opportunities". 99.9% of them would prefer to cut class, horse around, make drug deals, or at best, use the classroom computers to check their Hotmail. This is exactly what goes on during Computer Science class at my high school, and it is considered the most "academically elite" school in a city of 1.5 million.
Soviet education was at least an order of magnitude superior to American education.
...also, I failed to mention that portscanning should not be treated the same way as stealing from a store, because it is not the same at all. It is perhaps equivalent to looking around the store to see if there are any surveillance devices. As far as I know, looking around when you are in a store is perfectly legal. There are no security guards in every aisle saying "nothing to see here, move along."
Once you get a-thinking like that, you're going down a slippery slope to an increasingly fugitive mentality.
...And don't think that no one has ever been arrested for "stealing a 5 cent bazooka gum from your neighborhood grocery store's bulk candy section".
If port scanning is a right (a question I'll leave to others to address), then it must be protected, as all rights must be protected. If you allow it to be made illegal, rationalizing that it'll usually be overlooked by law enforcement anyway, you're putting yourself at the mercy of chance, making yourself a fugitive, rather than standing on solid ground and claiming what's justly yours.
MS puts out more and more processor-intensive bloatware, and as a result, we need to continuously buy faster and faster processors just to keep up.
DC has defrauded me. DC has defrauded us all.
We're having McVeigh's execution televised. Execution as entertainment is the ultimate in reality TV, it's also fucking sick and the downfall of all that is supposed to be called human.
IMHO, an interesting path of development this technology might follow is the advent of really giant airships, maybe ten miles long, carrying domed cities on top. They would stay in the air permanently and the inhabitants could spend all of their lives drifting around the globe.
IMHO, neither the University of Utah, nor anyone else, has any business whatsoever preventing open political discussion in a public forum.
That site was not UoU's intellectual property; it was no one's intellectual property. It is its own property; information is free. Those who opress information opress people; they are the proverbial bookburners. Their treacherous work is that of trying to dim the bright lights of human intellect. In the end, they will fail.
Meanwhile, I know what university I definitely will not be applying to come next fall...
Maybe the problem is that our calendar is simply too complicated. Why on earth are we using the Gregorian calendar, anyway? It would be far simpler to use a dating convention that has, let's say, 10 months per year, 10 days per month, 10 hours per day, and 10 minutes per hour. Better yet, we do not even have to name the units. Year = e0. Month = e-1. Day = e-2. Hour = e-3. Minute = e-4. Dates and times could then be represented easily by a single decimal. For example, 5.072 would 5th year, 0th month, 7th day, 2nd hour.
The fire-setting robots will be violating the First Law!
What -- do you mean to tell me that ELIZA isn't real?
After all these years...
Ah, but if this did not happen, then Voyager would still be 26 years away from Earth. Therefore, the 26-year-later Janeway would go back in time and help the crew get home.
You can probably see the circular reasoning that develops when you involve time travel in a plot. It's just an easy way out, and it ruins otherwise good sci-fi.
The Jews' rights were taken away not all of a sudden, but little by little, first the "less significant" rights, then the more basic ones. Which do you think would happen first: banning of firearms, or forced relocation to ghettos?
"In AD 2101, war was beginning..."
You talk about this as if it is a good thing. As if there's nothing wrong with turning kids into complacent little cynics as early as possible.
Instead of acclimating kids to all the things that are wrong with the world, I believe we should make them into idealistic people who will be appalled (rightfully so) at "a world in which the cops are watching you drive, the convience store is taping you, and your boss is looking over your shoulder", and will change their world for the better, or at least dedicate their energy to trying to do so.
We have a choice in what values we instill into our kids. We can train them to be complacent parts in the machine. Or we can make them idealistic, intelligent, imaginative, forward-thinking social revolutionaries who will be aware of themselves and of the world around them, and who will work to change society for the better!