The concept wherein the Legislature can keep the Executive branch in check falls apart when the Legislature is infiltrated by agents of the Executive branch...
When everybody on the Republican side rallies together and votes in lockstep with the raving mad President, any sense of "checks and balances" is effectively neutered. The strong polarization that is our political reality may not have been anticipated sufficiently by the founding fathers.
Now you have all the Republicans crying that we need to reconvene to solve our oil crisis by letting Big Oil trash our last remaining reefs and pollute our water, our air, and our horizon with no benefits to us (unless you are a stakeholder in Big Oil.)
For once, I'm glad the Congress went on vacation without passing legislation. If only they could have done this to the FISA bill.
I mean, it's not likely that they'd ACTUALLY find anything valid pertaining to terrorism anyways.
Soon they'll end up holding people saying that they have terrorist plans hidden inside of JPEGs using an unknown pad-cipher. They can basically make it be whatever they want. I'm just saying...
I'm certainly no expert, but I'd hope that if gas dropped back down to $0.50, the electric companies would be forced to follow suit... otherwise I'll be running my electric car with a diesel generator.
This is roughly how I went through learning to program starting at around the age of 14...
Start with HTML... it's very forgiving and is pretty straight forward. It's not exactly a "programming" language since it lacks logic among other things, but it's a good introduction and, lets face it, it's probably never going away.
Then some basic C programming for shell would be good... get him to build a basic text-based game... or some ASCII stuff. Play around with ANSI colors, get some exposure to how the language interacts with the OS and is presented to the user... You could also get him to make a C program that manipulates an HTML file in a few basic ways, like lower-casing, or applying a font style to loose text... etc...
Then quickly move onto Java or PHP before you get to any of the more complicated things like references and pointers... once the basics are all there with C's flow control and the basics of variables and functions. Perl is also not a bad place to play around briefly for the regular expressions and exposure to more exotic syntax.
Java and PHP are EXCELLENT proving grounds to learn just about all of the fundamentals of coding. PHP is a lot more forgiving than Java, but Java is the closest thing to C if he wishes to go back and take in all of the more complex practices in C. The thing about PHP is he'll need to learn pretty accurately how a browser and web server interact, and the stateless nature of HTTP.
Then learn SQL. MySQL will do to start with... then move onto PostgreSQL or MicrosoftSQL.
Then I'd say dive into C#.NET or build some GUI apps with GTK so he can experience an event-driven model and get introduced to GUI coding.
I suggest taking a "tour" of the programming world like this because then you know what you're up against and so much knowledge is transferable from one model or language to another. Jumping around lets you avoid biting off more than you can chew. At least, that worked for me.
If he gets this far, he should expect his first 4 years of college CSE major coursework to be a minimal distraction from his beer pong competitions.
As a resident of Pennsylvania, I'm looking forward to my property's eventual beachfront status... and the freakin' lime industry is endangering that now. That's just great!
It's not as though this would have been possible without the recording industry propelling them to stardom. Nobody would even know who Radiohead is, much less care about their dot matrix music video (which they probably couldn't have afforded.)
It's easy for them to go against the music industry now that they got what they needed out of it: brand recognition.
I'm sure this has been said before, but passenger trains are worth considering in addition to road and air travel.
I've never taken a serious train ride, but it seems like a reasonable means of going up and down the east coast. Just take a laptop and pretend you're in the office during that time. It's probably the cheapest and lowest hassle way to travel.
I'm sure DHS and Big Oil are working on that though too, though.
The government treats us all as criminals and forces us to expose a lot of our privacy, but when we look at the government with the same suspicion and demand accountability, we're labeled as unpatriotic crackpots and fed the red herring of "executive privilege".
Cell towers are installed for the sake of making voice calls... they happen to then make use of these for text messages. I'd hesitate to explain the price of text messages with the cost of installing towers, when that's already easily covered by our voice plans.
One of the replacement drives for the Mac G4 was a Hitachi, I remember now that you mention the brand. Not sure if that was the second one to go bad or the final one that is still functioning.
I believe the ThinkPad replacement was genuine IBM still.
Whatever the price difference, I'd much rather they sell me a guaranteed product, instead of a box of donuts with one donut and 11 mirrors inside. This kind of practice makes me not trust them one bit, and I only use them because they are (imo) a local monopoly (just about everywhere).
Moving to change school districts: practical. Moving to change cable providers: not so much.
Sometimes I think I'd rather pay for my usage. It works that way for electricity, water, and cell phones... I guess we get screwed even harder in those cases. But at least the electric company doesn't shut off my power when I've left the lights on over night.
Ever see the commercials where Comcast is advertising "1000 HD channels, soon"?
Yeah, read the "fine print" on that one and evidently they consider an OnDemand movie offering to be a channel.
This is so deceitful because how many HD channels do you know of that only play 1 show nonstopped for months at a time? That's not a channel in laymans terms if you ask me... that's a DVD.
I can watch tons of free on-demand HD content (from other sites) online over the cable modem, and they're not counting that in their channel lineup (yet).
Bottom line, Comcast is evil... but so is pretty much everybody else in this game. As usual, we're left to pick between a giant douche and a turd-sandwich.
My Quicksilver G4 burned out 2 hard drives in the 3 years I was covered by my extended warranty (which cost much more than the two hard drives and labor would have.)
Being tech savvy, it was extremely annoying having to wait more than a week each time to have the hard drive replaced and the OS restored by some hack a few towns over.
The initial drive was branded IBM... I don't remember what they replaced it with, but it didn't last long. (Unrelated, I had an IBM ThinkPad with an IBM drive that also died around the same time, and the model number had been discontinued and replaced with a new revision. Maybe this is why Apple moved away from IBM components, and IBM did as well...)
I recently tried to upgrade to the latest version of OS X and it left me with corrupt boot data and a broken OS.
I'm sure they've improved their products since then, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
All that said, an 8-core mac pro sometime in fall when they are supposedly going to refresh the product line is on my shopping list... I haven't found something with that much power at that price, and I need it for media work.
I didn't RTFA, but I have some common-sense questions... here goes:
Aren't all of these newsgroups readily available via literally hundreds of HTTP-based mirrors?
What about using non-Verizon news hosts to access the network? Proxies?
Is Verizon actually blocking the entire port, or doing deep packet inspection? What's to stop other ports from being used?
Are they just lopping off that part of the tree on their own mirroring servers?
Is this only for their own customers, or all the traffic going over their piece of the internet?
Unless they physically own the servers that host the primary version of this content, I don't see how it's possible to actually stop.
And furthermore, if they cut off alt.*, what's to stop people from just posting it elsewhere?
The internet was designed to be fault-tolerant against "attacks" like this!!! Those damn commie pinkos...
And what is with the "a democrat" statement in the summary... don't blame us. I think everybody is against child porn... and I doubt Verizon's handling of the matter is the requested course of action.
If AT&T can install secret rooms for the NSA and then demand immunity, surely Verizon can tell Cuomo to stop overreacting about his addiction to child porn and ignore orders like this.
Haha, cute... but I'll maintain that anything you can do in Ruby, I can do in pretty much any other modern language, and probably better by most metrics if you're not strictly concerned about how many lines the code is (because knowing Ruby programmers, you won't count all of the code in the libraries or the interpreter.)
I disagree about your personal attack on me. I happen to know many programming languages (which I started learning when I was just a child), I work full time as a system architect, I run a consulting business on the side, and I am passionate about all of it. I never stop learning... Ruby's no exception. I just don't use the damn language!
The narrow-minded people are the ones who would defend Ruby to their last dying breath as the only solution. Any niche that Ruby could fill is already dominated by other languages that are better at it; otherwise, it would outrank PHP, Java, C, etc, and that was my whole point in speaking about it being redundant.
C has callbacks, just take a look at (void *). In C#, it's actually implemented in an interesting way using the delegate keyword, which is actually like an array of callbacks that can be invoked with one call. In Java you can implement a callback as a method in an object that you pass around. In PHP, you can just do $f = "somefunc";, pass $f somewhere and then inside that function call $f();.
As for detecting the presence of a method, catching an undefined function, or importing/creating code, that's pretty standard too... In C that's statically linked, it's usually managed at compile-time using pre-processor commands; however, if you're doing something like dynamic-linking, you can usually use API functions in the same category used to load the library, to check the library manifest for a list of entry points. In Java, you can use Reflection to inspect anything in the interpreter's context, a try{}catch(){} if you wish to have it as a safety net for undefined elements, and the Runtime/Compiler classes (IIRC) to load (or even CREATE) classes dynamically. In PHP5 there are helper methods that you can define that will load classes if they do not exist already in the interpreter context.
And to be perfectly honest with you, in my lifetime of programming, if I've had to use much of that stuff, I probably needed to rethink my design, with the exception of fringe things like plugin architectures.
Also for the record (I know I'm splitting hairs, but it is a valid correction), my jQuery reference was an example of JavaScript, which is definitely not Java. That would be like saying Bash is C.
I just looked up Ruby DSL for the first time a minute ago, and it seems like a Perl coder's wet dream... I personally am not so sure it's worth the trouble... but maybe I haven't seen any good examples. I could probably do all of that stuff in clearer standard code in all of my choice languages.
As for metaprogramming... I also just had to look this up, and it seems like all the examples I found could be done just as easily with hash tables, and other libaries/design patterns. Most of the time a class or structure exists rigidly to serve as a standard interface. Having dynamic classes can get ugly, I would imagine.
I guess it's "neat" to see this stuff built so deeply into a programming language, but I still just don't see any reason to bother learning the language.
I may hold some misconceptions about it, though, and maybe I'm oldschool and like getting my hands dirty (and controlling the CPU fairly well with those same hands.) And Ruby just doesn't feel like a real player in the programming world: I don't know of any websites really that do any kind of high volume that use Ruby for the back end, I don't know of any real software that exists only in Ruby that I've ever needed, and I don't know any Ruby programmers in real life. It's kinda like a white rhino.
This is just my opinion. All these programming languages are just a means to an end, so if it works for you, use it!
Slashdot Mirror
The concept wherein the Legislature can keep the Executive branch in check falls apart when the Legislature is infiltrated by agents of the Executive branch...
When everybody on the Republican side rallies together and votes in lockstep with the raving mad President, any sense of "checks and balances" is effectively neutered. The strong polarization that is our political reality may not have been anticipated sufficiently by the founding fathers.
Now you have all the Republicans crying that we need to reconvene to solve our oil crisis by letting Big Oil trash our last remaining reefs and pollute our water, our air, and our horizon with no benefits to us (unless you are a stakeholder in Big Oil.)
For once, I'm glad the Congress went on vacation without passing legislation. If only they could have done this to the FISA bill.
That's what I've been saying all along...
I mean, it's not likely that they'd ACTUALLY find anything valid pertaining to terrorism anyways.
Soon they'll end up holding people saying that they have terrorist plans hidden inside of JPEGs using an unknown pad-cipher. They can basically make it be whatever they want. I'm just saying...
I'm certainly no expert, but I'd hope that if gas dropped back down to $0.50, the electric companies would be forced to follow suit... otherwise I'll be running my electric car with a diesel generator.
...but at this rate, I'd expect barrels of oil to be at parity with barrels of money by then.
Can I just get a car that runs directly on dollar bills and cut out the middleman?
This is roughly how I went through learning to program starting at around the age of 14...
Start with HTML... it's very forgiving and is pretty straight forward. It's not exactly a "programming" language since it lacks logic among other things, but it's a good introduction and, lets face it, it's probably never going away.
Then some basic C programming for shell would be good... get him to build a basic text-based game... or some ASCII stuff. Play around with ANSI colors, get some exposure to how the language interacts with the OS and is presented to the user... You could also get him to make a C program that manipulates an HTML file in a few basic ways, like lower-casing, or applying a font style to loose text... etc...
Then quickly move onto Java or PHP before you get to any of the more complicated things like references and pointers... once the basics are all there with C's flow control and the basics of variables and functions. Perl is also not a bad place to play around briefly for the regular expressions and exposure to more exotic syntax.
Java and PHP are EXCELLENT proving grounds to learn just about all of the fundamentals of coding. PHP is a lot more forgiving than Java, but Java is the closest thing to C if he wishes to go back and take in all of the more complex practices in C. The thing about PHP is he'll need to learn pretty accurately how a browser and web server interact, and the stateless nature of HTTP.
Then learn SQL. MySQL will do to start with... then move onto PostgreSQL or MicrosoftSQL.
Then I'd say dive into C# .NET or build some GUI apps with GTK so he can experience an event-driven model and get introduced to GUI coding.
I suggest taking a "tour" of the programming world like this because then you know what you're up against and so much knowledge is transferable from one model or language to another. Jumping around lets you avoid biting off more than you can chew. At least, that worked for me.
If he gets this far, he should expect his first 4 years of college CSE major coursework to be a minimal distraction from his beer pong competitions.
He's too busy running an array of air conditioners outside trying to combat this warming trend to be bothered with any of that science crap.
As a resident of Pennsylvania, I'm looking forward to my property's eventual beachfront status... and the freakin' lime industry is endangering that now. That's just great!
Sure they shut down access to the whole damn tree when all they would have had to do is add a new group:
alt.chris.hanson
"Oh no, Chris Hanson!?"
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben Franklin
Somehow we ended up with a society of people so conditioned to their constant safety and comfort that they take everything else for granted.
* Our forefathers are turning in their graves.
* These people should be shipped off to the third world.
It's not as though this would have been possible without the recording industry propelling them to stardom. Nobody would even know who Radiohead is, much less care about their dot matrix music video (which they probably couldn't have afforded.)
It's easy for them to go against the music industry now that they got what they needed out of it: brand recognition.
The chances it being found if left unmarked are very very very small.
That didn't work out so well for the cast of Alien vs. Predator... ;-)
That makes it a perfect place to host ThePirateBay :-)
I'm sure this has been said before, but passenger trains are worth considering in addition to road and air travel.
I've never taken a serious train ride, but it seems like a reasonable means of going up and down the east coast. Just take a laptop and pretend you're in the office during that time. It's probably the cheapest and lowest hassle way to travel.
I'm sure DHS and Big Oil are working on that though too, though.
The government treats us all as criminals and forces us to expose a lot of our privacy, but when we look at the government with the same suspicion and demand accountability, we're labeled as unpatriotic crackpots and fed the red herring of "executive privilege".
In laymans terms, I'd hardly call that a sound, though I guess technically any pressure change in any medium could be considered such.
Cell towers are installed for the sake of making voice calls... they happen to then make use of these for text messages. I'd hesitate to explain the price of text messages with the cost of installing towers, when that's already easily covered by our voice plans.
One of the replacement drives for the Mac G4 was a Hitachi, I remember now that you mention the brand. Not sure if that was the second one to go bad or the final one that is still functioning.
I believe the ThinkPad replacement was genuine IBM still.
Whatever the price difference, I'd much rather they sell me a guaranteed product, instead of a box of donuts with one donut and 11 mirrors inside. This kind of practice makes me not trust them one bit, and I only use them because they are (imo) a local monopoly (just about everywhere).
Moving to change school districts: practical.
Moving to change cable providers: not so much.
Sometimes I think I'd rather pay for my usage. It works that way for electricity, water, and cell phones... I guess we get screwed even harder in those cases. But at least the electric company doesn't shut off my power when I've left the lights on over night.
Ever see the commercials where Comcast is advertising "1000 HD channels, soon"?
Yeah, read the "fine print" on that one and evidently they consider an OnDemand movie offering to be a channel.
This is so deceitful because how many HD channels do you know of that only play 1 show nonstopped for months at a time? That's not a channel in laymans terms if you ask me... that's a DVD.
I can watch tons of free on-demand HD content (from other sites) online over the cable modem, and they're not counting that in their channel lineup (yet).
Bottom line, Comcast is evil... but so is pretty much everybody else in this game. As usual, we're left to pick between a giant douche and a turd-sandwich.
My Quicksilver G4 burned out 2 hard drives in the 3 years I was covered by my extended warranty (which cost much more than the two hard drives and labor would have.)
Being tech savvy, it was extremely annoying having to wait more than a week each time to have the hard drive replaced and the OS restored by some hack a few towns over.
The initial drive was branded IBM... I don't remember what they replaced it with, but it didn't last long. (Unrelated, I had an IBM ThinkPad with an IBM drive that also died around the same time, and the model number had been discontinued and replaced with a new revision. Maybe this is why Apple moved away from IBM components, and IBM did as well...)
I recently tried to upgrade to the latest version of OS X and it left me with corrupt boot data and a broken OS.
I'm sure they've improved their products since then, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
All that said, an 8-core mac pro sometime in fall when they are supposedly going to refresh the product line is on my shopping list... I haven't found something with that much power at that price, and I need it for media work.
I didn't RTFA, but I have some common-sense questions... here goes:
Aren't all of these newsgroups readily available via literally hundreds of HTTP-based mirrors?
What about using non-Verizon news hosts to access the network? Proxies?
Is Verizon actually blocking the entire port, or doing deep packet inspection? What's to stop other ports from being used?
Are they just lopping off that part of the tree on their own mirroring servers?
Is this only for their own customers, or all the traffic going over their piece of the internet?
Unless they physically own the servers that host the primary version of this content, I don't see how it's possible to actually stop.
And furthermore, if they cut off alt.*, what's to stop people from just posting it elsewhere?
The internet was designed to be fault-tolerant against "attacks" like this!!! Those damn commie pinkos...
And what is with the "a democrat" statement in the summary... don't blame us. I think everybody is against child porn... and I doubt Verizon's handling of the matter is the requested course of action.
If AT&T can install secret rooms for the NSA and then demand immunity, surely Verizon can tell Cuomo to stop overreacting about his addiction to child porn and ignore orders like this.
I'm getting a blazingly fast 0.01KB/s download speed from their site right now, when I'm not constantly getting disconnected, over our T1.
/sarcasm
I'm impressed already.
If I can't get this thing soon, I'm going to give up trying. I was only downloading it to see what all the fuss was about.
Thanks for getting that damn song stuck in my head again for the rest of the day now... :-P
Haha, cute... but I'll maintain that anything you can do in Ruby, I can do in pretty much any other modern language, and probably better by most metrics if you're not strictly concerned about how many lines the code is (because knowing Ruby programmers, you won't count all of the code in the libraries or the interpreter.)
I disagree about your personal attack on me. I happen to know many programming languages (which I started learning when I was just a child), I work full time as a system architect, I run a consulting business on the side, and I am passionate about all of it. I never stop learning... Ruby's no exception. I just don't use the damn language!
The narrow-minded people are the ones who would defend Ruby to their last dying breath as the only solution. Any niche that Ruby could fill is already dominated by other languages that are better at it; otherwise, it would outrank PHP, Java, C, etc, and that was my whole point in speaking about it being redundant.
C has callbacks, just take a look at (void *).
In C#, it's actually implemented in an interesting way using the delegate keyword, which is actually like an array of callbacks that can be invoked with one call.
In Java you can implement a callback as a method in an object that you pass around.
In PHP, you can just do $f = "somefunc";, pass $f somewhere and then inside that function call $f();.
As for detecting the presence of a method, catching an undefined function, or importing/creating code, that's pretty standard too...
In C that's statically linked, it's usually managed at compile-time using pre-processor commands; however, if you're doing something like dynamic-linking, you can usually use API functions in the same category used to load the library, to check the library manifest for a list of entry points.
In Java, you can use Reflection to inspect anything in the interpreter's context, a try{}catch(){} if you wish to have it as a safety net for undefined elements, and the Runtime/Compiler classes (IIRC) to load (or even CREATE) classes dynamically.
In PHP5 there are helper methods that you can define that will load classes if they do not exist already in the interpreter context.
And to be perfectly honest with you, in my lifetime of programming, if I've had to use much of that stuff, I probably needed to rethink my design, with the exception of fringe things like plugin architectures.
Also for the record (I know I'm splitting hairs, but it is a valid correction), my jQuery reference was an example of JavaScript, which is definitely not Java. That would be like saying Bash is C.
I just looked up Ruby DSL for the first time a minute ago, and it seems like a Perl coder's wet dream... I personally am not so sure it's worth the trouble... but maybe I haven't seen any good examples. I could probably do all of that stuff in clearer standard code in all of my choice languages.
As for metaprogramming... I also just had to look this up, and it seems like all the examples I found could be done just as easily with hash tables, and other libaries/design patterns. Most of the time a class or structure exists rigidly to serve as a standard interface. Having dynamic classes can get ugly, I would imagine.
I guess it's "neat" to see this stuff built so deeply into a programming language, but I still just don't see any reason to bother learning the language.
I may hold some misconceptions about it, though, and maybe I'm oldschool and like getting my hands dirty (and controlling the CPU fairly well with those same hands.) And Ruby just doesn't feel like a real player in the programming world: I don't know of any websites really that do any kind of high volume that use Ruby for the back end, I don't know of any real software that exists only in Ruby that I've ever needed, and I don't know any Ruby programmers in real life. It's kinda like a white rhino.
This is just my opinion. All these programming languages are just a means to an end, so if it works for you, use it!
Cheers and best of luck in Rubyland.