My ideal curriculum would start with a semester of Python just to get students familiar with how programming works without worrying about the intricacies of a specific language.
No. Start them up with Basic - and I mean the good old line-number one, not one of these new ones with procedures. Once their programs grow beyond the point where GOTO is practical, introduce the concepts of procedures and stack; then show how these can be managed automatically by the computer in, for example, C. Then wait again for the programs grow to spaghetti stage before introducing objects, automatic memory management, etc.
If you start with a modern language like Python, the students will never really understand why it has the features it has, because they've never run into the problems those features are intended to solve.
Then after that do Lisp or C/C++. Anything but Java.
Do you have some rational basis for your hatred for Java, or is it just a matter of taste ?
That's cool... until one of your "authorized" persons threatens the president!
Being a president means being the nominal head of your country. That, in turn, means being the most obvious target for anyone who said country has managed to piss off. Living with the knowledge that there are people in this world who want to kill and might act upon that desire you is part of the job. If you flip out and bust someone simply because someone else used his equipment to send such a threat, you aren't fit for the job, IMHO.
Besides, I'd imagine that the people who are serious about killing a president - or anyone else for that matter - don't warn their victim beforehand, unless they're complete morons.
The Silmarillion was a horrible book. The scattered notes, often contradictory, were not finished nor meant to be published. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was what should have been published. Nothing else.
It is a horrible book allright, but I'm still glad it was published. Some of us just love to burrow into a backstory like Gollum into Misty Mountains. For example, I've read dozens of D&D rulebooks just for fun, without ever having played the game.
Then again, I also consider physics textbooks light reading before bed...
I actually had 3d glasses with Rad Racer on the original NES. There was a special game mode you could use to turn it on. Unfortunately, my little brother sat on the glasses and bent them, so I only got to use them a few times.
So why didn't you fix them or make new ones ? They were nothing more than two pieces of cellophane, one red and one green, on cardboard frame.
f I remember right, the effect mostly just turned everything orange...
They didn't work at all. The green cellophane piece just made the red image a little darker, and ditto for the other lens too. The end result was truly pathetic, even by standards of the day. Then again, it was - and still is, thanks to ZSNes - to drive with the 3D-mode on and no glasses:).
I just realized that I've gotten nostalgic about a NES game. I'm getting old:(.
Look, as long as we don't connect it to a sentient computer, it's perfectly safe. Sure, it might kill us all, but at least we don't face the unfathomable horror of being - dare I even say it - slightly bored.
Not all lives are worth the same. Some should be wiped out. Those that spend their time harming others constantly and on purpose are worth nothing to me.
Presumably, those people also have some rationalization for why other people's lives are worth nothing to them. Which, of course, doesn't make it any less tempting to let them taste their own medicine. Still, I can't help but wonder if they too started with "assholes should be wiped out" and then gradually expanded the definition of "asshole" until it covered pretty much everyone ?
Not that this is relevant, since the grandparent poster was talking about human lives vs. property, not one human life vs. another.
By moving off shore they can bypass all privacy laws anywhere. This means they'll truly own our informaion.
However, as there is no one to back that claim of ownership either, it's just a question of who'll ride and tow away these highly valuable high-tech computing centers first.
Take an example of someone breaking in to your house with the intent of harming you and your family.
Soft-power is a liberal whining "You better stop trying to harm my family...or...uh...I'll say stop again or maybe call the cops." The intruder then kills you and your family and gets away during the 5 minutes it takes the cops to respond.
Hard power is when you stand there with a gun and say "Get on the ground, and don't move until the cops get here." The intruder either complies and is arrested when the cops arrive, or is shot when he ignores you and still attempts to harm your family.
Soft power would be you trying to reason with the burglar, pointing out that it's much better to face charges on breaking and entering than murder, do you really want to remember the face of some kid you shot for the rest of your life, blah blah blah. It might still get you killed, of course, but so can pulling a gun on someone who's armed.
"Soft power" is no more about being a weak whiner than hard power is about being a bloodthirsty maniac. It simply means using persuasion rather than coercion. It is foolish to not be ready to use hard power when needed, because some people don't listen to reason, but it's equally foolish to turn something which can be resolved through talking into a gunfight to death because you think that soft power is for sissies.
Soft power does nothing unless you are willing and able to back it up with hard power.
Soft power, like all power, requires skill to wield efficiently. And like all power, it is not efficient in every situation. Neither is hard power, nor any other kind of power. The wise trains in the use of each and picks whichever is suitable; the macho idiot gets gunned down when trying to shoot his way out of a bad situation; and the liberal whiner, as you noted, gets shot when trying to reason with a psychopath.
Besides, getting a gun in the first place requires using soft power, unless you steal it.
My current employer gives job applicants a programming assessment. Solve a simple problem related to the work you'll be doing, and your future co-workers look at the code. If your code looks good and its works, you get the job. If it doesn't work or you handle your exceptions badly or something like that, you don't get the job.
What happens if your potential future co-workers figure you're better than them and don't want competition ? How do you deal with WallyException ?-)
It doesn't matter if it's compiler-dependent or not. The correct answer to that question is: "This code is badly written. It never makes sense to write i = i++. You probably mean i++."
It's even worse than that. It's undefined behaviour. Anything could happen, including corrupting memory in such a way that the code fails catastrophically three days later and takes out the LSE for a day.
It takes the current value of i (0), ads 1 to it, assigns the resulting value (1) back to i, and then assigns the value 1 to i again. While it is certainly redundant, I don't see what's undefined about it, or how can it corrupt memory. What am I missing ?
but it takes a trained psychologist to correctly asses the results
Actually a psychologist that trains other psychologists assured me that you get nothing other than total bullshit out of the small number of questions that HR people think they can use to determine your personality.
Yes, that sounds like a correct assessment to me:).
"not Free Software, hence unsuitable for Ubuntu main"
I'd like to see Linux become more prevalent but this way of thinking makes that less and less likely. I want the best tools for the job, not just the most ideologically compatible.
Sadly, unlikely physical tools which once bought are yours to do with as you please, software comes with licenses which limit its use. That's why the license a particular piece of software comes with is a crucial part in determining its usefulness. The technically best tool in the world isn't any good if you aren't allowed to use it.
There is no place in my computer for licence fundamentalism
Due to the perverse aberration which is copyright law, you require a license to use a program. Due to the particularly hideous nature of that perversion, this license can have pretty much any terms, and it is anyone's guess which ones are actually legally binding. And due to the maliciously inhuman nature of the aberration, the punishment for breaking these twisted contracts can be a lifetime of debt slavery. As such, being careful what licenses the software in your computer uses isn't fundamentalism, but simple common sense and a matter of self-protection; it is foolish to deal lightly with the spawn of the pits who write those treaties.
That is why I think long and hard before allowing anything that is not licensed under GPL into my computer; I'm not well-versed in the dark arts of lawyercraft, and I fear my sanity would darken were I to gaze at the indescribable horror that is found on the pages of Intellectual Property Law. Thus do I fear the consequences were I to misinterprate the filthy tomes known as EULAs.
There's different kinds of anonynimity, there's the one where no-one truly knows who you are (eg you send an anonymous letter to a journalist), then there's the one where someone knows who you are but refuses to divulge that information (eg a journalist who has interviewed you and posts your story as an anonymous source).
Both provide you with the same anonymity, but the latter obviously carries more authority.
No. The difference between these two types of anonymity is that the former actually protects you against a tyrant, while the latter only protects you against a nice, law-abiding, touchy-feely tyrant who'd never torture your name out of the journalist.
If the courts have decided that you have the right to anonymity online, then its surely ok for (say) your ISP to know who you are - they cannot reveal that information unless they get a court order allowing them to violate your legal right.
No, that is not okay, not if you're doing anything actually important with your anonymity. It wouldn't be okay even if the ISP's and everyone else involved could actually be trusted to obey the laws - which they can't, as the whole telcom wiretap issue and following retroactive immunity proves.
This latter form of anonyminity wouldn't apply to spammers, scammers, bullies and other malicious scum (ie the courts would grant a warrant everytime) and so might help to stop them and would make the internet an altogther better place to be.
The problem is: what happens when the malicious scum is the accuser, rather than the accused ?
"Accountability" sure sounds nice, until you realize just who you're be accountable for.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen the ads. I only know what the summary and previous comments told me. But that's never stopped anyone before:).
Does anyone want to be any member of that family? Are any of the scenes they show the family in enjoyable?
But the family rejected Microsoft (Gates). Maybe the point is to get you to associate rejecting Microsoft with people you don't want to be, as well as not having enjoyable time.
What does Bill and Jerry talking about how rich they are, then ripping off the pizza boy tell me about Microsoft?
That it's better to be in the "in" group of Microsoft, represented here by Jerry, because that way you'll be rich, rather than the "out" group, represented by the pizza boy, because then you'll get ripped off.
You don't pay to build it. The municipality sells bonds to pay for the construction, then leases out bandwidth/pipe space to interested companies. The income from this pays back the bonds and pays for the maintenance of the infrastructure.
You pay for access to the leased space, at a markup of course. You are paying for the content: water; natural gas; telephone; IP address, connectivity, and bandwidth.
So I end up paying to build it after all, just through several twists, and a markup - shareholder profit - on top of that.
I'm also very much in favor of small government, but the municipality should own the power lines, com lines, data lines, fiber, sewage pipe, gas pipe (natural, maybe others if there is a need; plan ahead), and water pipes. These transmission mediums are then leased out to providers who sell water, gas, sewage disposal, com bandwidth for a profit. Hell, Arrowhead or Sparklets could lease pipe space and sell their water that way! Your subscription to these various services allows the commercial enterprise to pay the lease from the muni, which can then pay for the maintenance.
And the end result of all that is that I'll pay for the maintenance of public utilities, and a profit to shareholders of some private corporation on top of that. This system combines the worst qualities of both socialistic systems - the lack of choice - and capitalistic ones - getting the minimum possible service for the maximum possible price. Brilliant.
Yeah... that'll happen. You see, if lawers stopped doing that, then we won't need lawers to protect us from that. I'm sure an entire line of work would admit they are their own problem.
The rule of law requires laws to be written in precise enough manner that there is no room for interpretation. Doing so requires you to define each term and corner case exactly, which in turn makes law so complex it requires a professional to understand it. The alternative is that judges judge based on their own interpretations, which are ultimately arbitrary.
In a way, I guess you could consider lawmaking as programming the society. It's easy to get the gist of it right, but when your code needs to deal with all the possible bizarre corner case inputs (cases), it slowly but surely turns into a potful of spaghetti.
Have you forgotten that the government is a MONOPOLY? That governments get to take your money whether you want to pay it or not? Contrast that with competing companies that have to persuade you to part with your dollars.
I could had sworn that the US had more than one municipality, and that you could freely move between them. For that matter, I thought that there were other countries on Earth as well... Oh well, live and learn.
Yeah, competing companies are magic beings (although of course they don't mean to be) and the government just ruins your life )when it tries to do more than keep the peace).
The most efficient way of keeping peace is to make sure that everyone is happy enough to not bother rioting; every other option is a more or less extreme variation of the "iron boot stomping on human face" -theme. And keeping everyone happy requires providing a sufficiently high standard of living, which in turn requires providing services. The question then is: what is the most efficient way of providing a given service ?
Sad...I am pretty much for the smallest, most unobtrusive, non-invasive govt possible, especially for the feds, but, I do feel one of the few things govt. is for, is infrastructure...and to me that would be laying down phone lines, cable and fiber...but, not have them run it. The companies could then have access to them to provide services and have actual competition.
I have a question. Why is it in mine, the private citizens, best interests to have to pay a private company to use a network I have already paid to build ? It seems to me that the only "competition" I'd get here is which company takes the smallest profit margin when re-renting what they rented from the municipal government; in other words, who is the least greedy parasite.
Or, in other words: Why should the private companies get the profit and the taxpaying public the bill ?
Much like the govt. puts down highways...but, private companies run the gas stations along the way....
Companies also build those gas stations and supply them with gas, staff, and other necessities. What do the companies supply here, except middleman charges ?
Slashdot Mirror
Just the legless ones. Sounds like a typical libertarian.
No. Start them up with Basic - and I mean the good old line-number one, not one of these new ones with procedures. Once their programs grow beyond the point where GOTO is practical, introduce the concepts of procedures and stack; then show how these can be managed automatically by the computer in, for example, C. Then wait again for the programs grow to spaghetti stage before introducing objects, automatic memory management, etc.
If you start with a modern language like Python, the students will never really understand why it has the features it has, because they've never run into the problems those features are intended to solve.
Do you have some rational basis for your hatred for Java, or is it just a matter of taste ?
Being a president means being the nominal head of your country. That, in turn, means being the most obvious target for anyone who said country has managed to piss off. Living with the knowledge that there are people in this world who want to kill and might act upon that desire you is part of the job. If you flip out and bust someone simply because someone else used his equipment to send such a threat, you aren't fit for the job, IMHO.
Besides, I'd imagine that the people who are serious about killing a president - or anyone else for that matter - don't warn their victim beforehand, unless they're complete morons.
It is a horrible book allright, but I'm still glad it was published. Some of us just love to burrow into a backstory like Gollum into Misty Mountains. For example, I've read dozens of D&D rulebooks just for fun, without ever having played the game.
Then again, I also consider physics textbooks light reading before bed...
So why didn't you fix them or make new ones ? They were nothing more than two pieces of cellophane, one red and one green, on cardboard frame.
They didn't work at all. The green cellophane piece just made the red image a little darker, and ditto for the other lens too. The end result was truly pathetic, even by standards of the day. Then again, it was - and still is, thanks to ZSNes - to drive with the 3D-mode on and no glasses :).
I just realized that I've gotten nostalgic about a NES game. I'm getting old :(.
Look, as long as we don't connect it to a sentient computer, it's perfectly safe. Sure, it might kill us all, but at least we don't face the unfathomable horror of being - dare I even say it - slightly bored.
Just make the barge from several segments and attach generators to the hinges. No need to secure anything to the seabed.
Presumably, those people also have some rationalization for why other people's lives are worth nothing to them. Which, of course, doesn't make it any less tempting to let them taste their own medicine. Still, I can't help but wonder if they too started with "assholes should be wiped out" and then gradually expanded the definition of "asshole" until it covered pretty much everyone ?
Not that this is relevant, since the grandparent poster was talking about human lives vs. property, not one human life vs. another.
However, as there is no one to back that claim of ownership either, it's just a question of who'll ride and tow away these highly valuable high-tech computing centers first.
Soft power would be you trying to reason with the burglar, pointing out that it's much better to face charges on breaking and entering than murder, do you really want to remember the face of some kid you shot for the rest of your life, blah blah blah. It might still get you killed, of course, but so can pulling a gun on someone who's armed.
"Soft power" is no more about being a weak whiner than hard power is about being a bloodthirsty maniac. It simply means using persuasion rather than coercion. It is foolish to not be ready to use hard power when needed, because some people don't listen to reason, but it's equally foolish to turn something which can be resolved through talking into a gunfight to death because you think that soft power is for sissies.
Soft power, like all power, requires skill to wield efficiently. And like all power, it is not efficient in every situation. Neither is hard power, nor any other kind of power. The wise trains in the use of each and picks whichever is suitable; the macho idiot gets gunned down when trying to shoot his way out of a bad situation; and the liberal whiner, as you noted, gets shot when trying to reason with a psychopath.
Besides, getting a gun in the first place requires using soft power, unless you steal it.
He doesn't give it for free, he gets it for free from the Internet and then charges to view it.
What happens if your potential future co-workers figure you're better than them and don't want competition ? How do you deal with WallyException ?-)
It takes the current value of i (0), ads 1 to it, assigns the resulting value (1) back to i, and then assigns the value 1 to i again. While it is certainly redundant, I don't see what's undefined about it, or how can it corrupt memory. What am I missing ?
Yes, that sounds like a correct assessment to me :).
Sadly, unlikely physical tools which once bought are yours to do with as you please, software comes with licenses which limit its use. That's why the license a particular piece of software comes with is a crucial part in determining its usefulness. The technically best tool in the world isn't any good if you aren't allowed to use it.
Due to the perverse aberration which is copyright law, you require a license to use a program. Due to the particularly hideous nature of that perversion, this license can have pretty much any terms, and it is anyone's guess which ones are actually legally binding. And due to the maliciously inhuman nature of the aberration, the punishment for breaking these twisted contracts can be a lifetime of debt slavery. As such, being careful what licenses the software in your computer uses isn't fundamentalism, but simple common sense and a matter of self-protection; it is foolish to deal lightly with the spawn of the pits who write those treaties.
That is why I think long and hard before allowing anything that is not licensed under GPL into my computer; I'm not well-versed in the dark arts of lawyercraft, and I fear my sanity would darken were I to gaze at the indescribable horror that is found on the pages of Intellectual Property Law. Thus do I fear the consequences were I to misinterprate the filthy tomes known as EULAs.
No. The difference between these two types of anonymity is that the former actually protects you against a tyrant, while the latter only protects you against a nice, law-abiding, touchy-feely tyrant who'd never torture your name out of the journalist.
No, that is not okay, not if you're doing anything actually important with your anonymity. It wouldn't be okay even if the ISP's and everyone else involved could actually be trusted to obey the laws - which they can't, as the whole telcom wiretap issue and following retroactive immunity proves.
The problem is: what happens when the malicious scum is the accuser, rather than the accused ?
"Accountability" sure sounds nice, until you realize just who you're be accountable for.
I guess you didn't read the EULA >:)
"iPod - to your child what tail is to a salamander !"
Disclaimer: I haven't seen the ads. I only know what the summary and previous comments told me. But that's never stopped anyone before :).
But the family rejected Microsoft (Gates). Maybe the point is to get you to associate rejecting Microsoft with people you don't want to be, as well as not having enjoyable time.
That it's better to be in the "in" group of Microsoft, represented here by Jerry, because that way you'll be rich, rather than the "out" group, represented by the pizza boy, because then you'll get ripped off.
Because the people who benefit from that are more powerful that you are.
Even if the Steam servers go down 4 years from now ?
So I end up paying to build it after all, just through several twists, and a markup - shareholder profit - on top of that.
And the end result of all that is that I'll pay for the maintenance of public utilities, and a profit to shareholders of some private corporation on top of that. This system combines the worst qualities of both socialistic systems - the lack of choice - and capitalistic ones - getting the minimum possible service for the maximum possible price. Brilliant.
The rule of law requires laws to be written in precise enough manner that there is no room for interpretation. Doing so requires you to define each term and corner case exactly, which in turn makes law so complex it requires a professional to understand it. The alternative is that judges judge based on their own interpretations, which are ultimately arbitrary.
In a way, I guess you could consider lawmaking as programming the society. It's easy to get the gist of it right, but when your code needs to deal with all the possible bizarre corner case inputs (cases), it slowly but surely turns into a potful of spaghetti.
I could had sworn that the US had more than one municipality, and that you could freely move between them. For that matter, I thought that there were other countries on Earth as well... Oh well, live and learn.
The most efficient way of keeping peace is to make sure that everyone is happy enough to not bother rioting; every other option is a more or less extreme variation of the "iron boot stomping on human face" -theme. And keeping everyone happy requires providing a sufficiently high standard of living, which in turn requires providing services. The question then is: what is the most efficient way of providing a given service ?
I have a question. Why is it in mine, the private citizens, best interests to have to pay a private company to use a network I have already paid to build ? It seems to me that the only "competition" I'd get here is which company takes the smallest profit margin when re-renting what they rented from the municipal government; in other words, who is the least greedy parasite.
Or, in other words: Why should the private companies get the profit and the taxpaying public the bill ?
Companies also build those gas stations and supply them with gas, staff, and other necessities. What do the companies supply here, except middleman charges ?