Some of these are things that a CS degree should already require, but "should" means so little these days...
Write an interpreter for some language, or a subset of one. Experiment with different data structures to represent the code being interpreted.
Then write a compiler for it. (At least a bytecode compiler and an interpreter for the bytecode.)
Write at least some sort of database library and see how fast you can make it run.
Figure out at least one thing that's easy to write in C (or Java, etc.) and hard to write in Lisp (or O'Caml, Haskell, etc.), and understand why. Then do the same with the languages reversed.
Nobody's going to attack you if they like you, right? Congratulations, you win a prize for naivete. Please summarize (a) all the reasons that people hate America and (b) for each, a solution that does not create or enhance any other reason to hate America. For bonus points, produce a written statement from each and every person who hates America that assures that none of them will continue hating America if all of your proposed solutions are enacted.
Better yet, learn at least three vastly different languages at at least a high intermediate level, or even master them. When you are confronted with a problem and immediately see its solution in, say, C++, Lisp, and Ruby, you will be able to quickly choose the right tool for the job (where "tool" could mean "closures" or "objects" just as easily as it could mean "Lisp" or "C++"). Even if you don't have that tool available to you (if your employer requires you to use Java, for instance), you will still be able to solve the problem faster and more elegantly.
This guy is one (admittedly massive) schematic diagram and a little bit of chemical electrical cell technology short of saving the world, iff certain apocalyptic events occur within his lifetime and he survives without any brain damage. He's one up on me.
A better way to start is to get a high-quality kit. In larger cities in the US, at least in the Midwest, you can find homebrew supply stores that sell everything you need or could possibly want. A couple of my favorite stores are Midwest Supplies and Brew and Grow of Minnesota. (The 'grow' refers to hydroponic gardening, which I don't do. I have avoided asking what they grow and if they sell seeds.:P)
Midwest Supplies will sell you kits ranging from the basics, doing your fermentation in a plastic bucket, up to 42-gallon stainless steel fermenters costing thousands of dollars. I personally am somewhat of a high-end novice brewer, so I don't do kegging and I haven't made a lager yet, and I am just starting to put together the equipment to do all-grain brewing (instead of using malt extract, which makes a very nice beer but lacks some of the DIY feeling that we all get out of writing our own compilers and malting our own barley from our own local granaries).
One thing you should definitely do is pick up a copy of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, in any edition (I believe the Third is on shelves presently. It's in paperback and the guy has been brewing beer since the days of the PDP-10.)
Here's the process and equipment that went into my last batch of ale, a nut-brown:
In a large stainless steel pot, boil X gallons of water (3 is good) and 6.6 pounds of malt extract (two 3.3-pound cans, I believe I used amber but don't have my brewing notes with me at the office today) along with a muslin sack of cracked specialty malts of barley, in this case some "chocolate" malt and some 50L crystal malt, plus the boiling hops for bitterness
In the last 5 minutes of the boil, add finishing hops for aroma and flavor
Put a few gallons (5 - X) of water into a 5-gallon glass carboy, and add the boiled "wort"; add cool water to fill carboy to not far below the base of its neck
Allow to cool below 80F, preferably down to 74F
Pitch the yeast, which you may want to have cultured to get more active yeast cells into your beer right away
Affix a hose to the top of the carboy, with its submerged in a small pail of water (a sanitizer solution is better; see Star-San product)
After a few days, the blow-off hose will be done doing its job of allowing crud from the top of your beer to blow off during the kraeusening phase of the yeast's job, so you can replace it with a fermentation lock
After a couple weeks total fermentation time at room temperature, your beer will be done; three days in a row of the same hydrometer reading will confirm this
Boil a pint of water and 1-1/2 cup of dried malt extract (or 3/4 cup corn sugar if you don't want as firm of a head on your beer) for a few minutes, put it in the bottom of your sanitized plastic bottling bucket with its spigot closed, siphon all the beer out of the carboy into the bucket, leaving the yeast sediment on the bottom of the carboy, and use a bottle filler (with a valve that opens only when you press it against the bottom of a bottle) to fill your bottles, leaving about an inch of air space and capping them with caps that you've boiled in water to sterilize them
Wait 1-2 weeks for bottle conditioning, including carbonation, to finish
Chill, pour into a glass, leaving the yeast sediment in the bottle, and enjoy
Note that I put my finishing sugar into the whole batch instead of into each bottle. This ensures consistency from bottle to bottle and reduces the number of opportunities to introduce the beer to an unsanitary environment.
It's a simple process and you can get all the equipment you need for $80 and all the ingredients for a 5-gallon batch of beer for less than the cost of buying 5 gallons of Bud Light. The results will usually be good and there is truly no end to the tweaking you can engage in to make your beer. Pretty much everyo
De Beers Executive: We routinely use three kinds of marketing. Liminal, subliminal, and superliminal.
Lisa Simpson: Superliminal?
De Beers Executive opens a window and yells: Hey, you! Buy diamonds!
Don't forget another $50,000-100,000 for enough batteries to survive when you live in a colder climate and sometimes get 2 months of cloudy skies and freezing temperatures.
My favorite little hypocrisy among large groups of otherwise well-meaning Christians is a literal reading of the Creation story in Genesis taken together with an insistence on a very loose, figurative reading of the Revelation. You simply can't say that something in Revelation is about a tank or a nuclear missile and still insist that a day in Genesis is one Earth day.
My reading of the Bible is that it tells us the fact that God created the universe, but it says nothing of how. Christian faith is entirely compatible with modern science - they are orthogonal.
I think that "de facto standard" is undergoing the same illiteracy shift as "treasure trove" did, where people don't understand how to parse the phrase, mistake the noun for the adjective and vice versa, and start using the adjective as if it were the noun. Please, help fight this shift in the language. "De facto" is a much more important term than "trove" ever was, so it's essential to our continued ability to communicate effectively that it not lose its meaning and come to just mean "standard." Thank you for your support.
Isn't this like comparing apples to apes?:P No, seriously, the blurb was too stupid for me to bother reading anything more. Someone was really just digging for three-part stereotypes for the two OSes.
I don't give too much credence to the Napoleon bit. Just the part about Brits using smaller carriages and not wanting to get their whips caught in the top, while Americans did their typical bigger-is-better and brute-force-or-be-damned approach and just rode on the damn horse.
I find the teamster explanation to be very plausible. See this site for some of the story, this one for some more, and this one to try to find the site I originally read this explanation on which does a much better job of it, though I can't find it now.
If you acknowledge that age and maturity play a role in the capacity to knowingly consent to have sex, you are then faced with your choice of two systems for deciding how to define statutory rape: Either you draw a fine, black line or you have a trial to decide the issue of the alleged victim's capacity to consent every time two people have sex. That's every time, for any two people. If you don't draw a fine line, you have to decide whether that 30-year-old woman really had the capacity to consent to have sex with her 30-year-old boyfriend, and whether he had that same capacity.
The fine, black line method works because everyone who is about to have sex knows how to determine whether the other party has the legal capacity to consent and there is no need to investigate every single sexual act to determine whether one or another party to it should be prosecuted. Drawing the line at the age of 18 may not make any more or less sense than drawing it at 12 or at 40 to some people, but the line does have to be drawn somewhere, unless you deny that age and maturity play any role in the capacity to knowingly consent to have sex.
And that's why we have a statutory age of consent. However, saying that it's just 18 across the board in the USA vastly oversimplifies matters. Every state has its own laws on this, and some are smart while others are downright bizarre.
Slashdot Mirror
Often, that reason is that he failed to read my entire comment. Try again - I already confronted exactly the problem you raised. :)
Better yet, learn at least three vastly different languages at at least a high intermediate level, or even master them. When you are confronted with a problem and immediately see its solution in, say, C++, Lisp, and Ruby, you will be able to quickly choose the right tool for the job (where "tool" could mean "closures" or "objects" just as easily as it could mean "Lisp" or "C++"). Even if you don't have that tool available to you (if your employer requires you to use Java, for instance), you will still be able to solve the problem faster and more elegantly.
This guy is one (admittedly massive) schematic diagram and a little bit of chemical electrical cell technology short of saving the world, iff certain apocalyptic events occur within his lifetime and he survives without any brain damage. He's one up on me.
Midwest Supplies will sell you kits ranging from the basics, doing your fermentation in a plastic bucket, up to 42-gallon stainless steel fermenters costing thousands of dollars. I personally am somewhat of a high-end novice brewer, so I don't do kegging and I haven't made a lager yet, and I am just starting to put together the equipment to do all-grain brewing (instead of using malt extract, which makes a very nice beer but lacks some of the DIY feeling that we all get out of writing our own compilers and malting our own barley from our own local granaries).
One thing you should definitely do is pick up a copy of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, in any edition (I believe the Third is on shelves presently. It's in paperback and the guy has been brewing beer since the days of the PDP-10.)
Here's the process and equipment that went into my last batch of ale, a nut-brown:
Note that I put my finishing sugar into the whole batch instead of into each bottle. This ensures consistency from bottle to bottle and reduces the number of opportunities to introduce the beer to an unsanitary environment.
It's a simple process and you can get all the equipment you need for $80 and all the ingredients for a 5-gallon batch of beer for less than the cost of buying 5 gallons of Bud Light. The results will usually be good and there is truly no end to the tweaking you can engage in to make your beer. Pretty much everyo
De Beers Executive: We routinely use three kinds of marketing. Liminal, subliminal, and superliminal.
Lisa Simpson: Superliminal?
De Beers Executive opens a window and yells: Hey, you! Buy diamonds!
What, no +1 Funny mods? Perhaps our AC friend was a mite too subtle.
With blackjack, and hookers...
In fact, forget the mirror! ...and the blackjack.
No animals were harmed in the making of this robot. (At least the animals didn't complain!)
Galactic Emporium: Dealing in legal items, etc.
The SI unit is the millihelen, defined as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
Wrong language. The story is just r'tarded, nothing to see here.
Don't forget another $50,000-100,000 for enough batteries to survive when you live in a colder climate and sometimes get 2 months of cloudy skies and freezing temperatures.
I thought that they already had. That makes this most recent award all the more meaningful.
My favorite little hypocrisy among large groups of otherwise well-meaning Christians is a literal reading of the Creation story in Genesis taken together with an insistence on a very loose, figurative reading of the Revelation. You simply can't say that something in Revelation is about a tank or a nuclear missile and still insist that a day in Genesis is one Earth day.
My reading of the Bible is that it tells us the fact that God created the universe, but it says nothing of how. Christian faith is entirely compatible with modern science - they are orthogonal.
I think that "de facto standard" is undergoing the same illiteracy shift as "treasure trove" did, where people don't understand how to parse the phrase, mistake the noun for the adjective and vice versa, and start using the adjective as if it were the noun. Please, help fight this shift in the language. "De facto" is a much more important term than "trove" ever was, so it's essential to our continued ability to communicate effectively that it not lose its meaning and come to just mean "standard." Thank you for your support.
I don't know about you, but I'm going to peacefully coexist with robots. I'll drink beer and play video games all day, and not get blamed for a thing!
Oh, how convenient! A theory about God that doesn't require looking through a telescope. Get back to work!
Isn't this like comparing apples to apes? :P No, seriously, the blurb was too stupid for me to bother reading anything more. Someone was really just digging for three-part stereotypes for the two OSes.
I don't give too much credence to the Napoleon bit. Just the part about Brits using smaller carriages and not wanting to get their whips caught in the top, while Americans did their typical bigger-is-better and brute-force-or-be-damned approach and just rode on the damn horse.
I find the teamster explanation to be very plausible. See this site for some of the story, this one for some more, and this one to try to find the site I originally read this explanation on which does a much better job of it, though I can't find it now.
Burma-Shave?
If you acknowledge that age and maturity play a role in the capacity to knowingly consent to have sex, you are then faced with your choice of two systems for deciding how to define statutory rape: Either you draw a fine, black line or you have a trial to decide the issue of the alleged victim's capacity to consent every time two people have sex. That's every time, for any two people. If you don't draw a fine line, you have to decide whether that 30-year-old woman really had the capacity to consent to have sex with her 30-year-old boyfriend, and whether he had that same capacity.
The fine, black line method works because everyone who is about to have sex knows how to determine whether the other party has the legal capacity to consent and there is no need to investigate every single sexual act to determine whether one or another party to it should be prosecuted. Drawing the line at the age of 18 may not make any more or less sense than drawing it at 12 or at 40 to some people, but the line does have to be drawn somewhere, unless you deny that age and maturity play any role in the capacity to knowingly consent to have sex.
And that's why we have a statutory age of consent. However, saying that it's just 18 across the board in the USA vastly oversimplifies matters. Every state has its own laws on this, and some are smart while others are downright bizarre.