This is Slashdot mate. It's OK to program in BASIC as long as you rename the interpreter to PYTHON.EXE instead of BASIC.EXE. Trust me. Most of the people who dis BASIC, FORTRAN and COBOL wouldn't be able to tell whether you were programming in BASIC, Perl, or APL even if they saw the code.
***I don't see that there's any niche for a netbook.. unless you really really want a proper laptop and you can't afford one.. because netbooks are just cheap laptops.***
You might want to talk to my wife. She uses her computers for four things -- playing FreeCell, reading e-books, eMail, and web surfing. Her netbook does all those things well. She loves it.
Until we get tablets with real keyboards with tactile feedback, I'm pretty sure that they are not going to replace her netbook.
If you're referring to prohibition in the US, doctors wrote prescriptions for one pint of whiskey not beer. The prescriptions could be filled at drugstores. ISTR that one of our national drugstore chains in the US got its start in the prohibition era as an outlet for prescription whisky, but I could have that wrong.
======
As for three drinks a day keeps the doctor away, I'd like to suggest the possibility that keeping doctors and other medical professionals at a substantial distance might have more positive effect on longevity than how much ethanol one consumes.
***What's fascinating right off the bat is I don't think many public schools here in the U.S. would institute lesson plans involving free and open-source software.. most use and/or are funded by commercial software.***
No so actually, but there is too much software required by teachers, staff etc that runs even worse under OSS than it does under Windows for OSS to really be viable. Programmers and their managers have created an utter shambles because of their inability to promulgate meaningful standards and -- if they actually manage a coherent standard -- to adhere to it. As a result, school IT people stumble along using the least unacceptable common element -- Windows XP -- and Internet Explorer or maybe Firefox and trying, with varying degrees of success, to work around the very numerous problems resulting from the use of this ill-crafted junk.
About the best you can say today for OSS vs Windows is that at least the OSS folks don't have the audacity to charge for their product.
Will all this change? I used to hope so. I'm beginning to suspect not.... Maybe when personal communication devices eventually replace PCs on school and office desktops. But I doubt it. IT folks and their bosses apparently were created by God with lots of brains but no common sense. I don't see that changing unless and until the entire IT world implodes because the software and interfaces thereto have become either unmaintainable and/or too insecure for serious use. (And yes, I think that either or both could happen)
All that may be true -- and good for your eighth grader. Nonetheless, presenting a class of anything other than budding geniuses with the most notoriously user unfriendly interface in the Open Source world seems imprudent. Maybe Kolourpaint instead of the Gimp?
***What exactly is the point of jetpacks supposed to be? ***
There will be some uses for them. Carrying cables across canyons; access to otherwise difficult locations; maybe even some rescue operations eventually. But they are likely to be noisy, dangerous, to have limited load capability. The experimental devices built in the past are said to have a history of leg and leg joint injuries.
***Seems the much maligned president owned, with little fanfare, a rather "green" home. Passive solar heating, natural cooling, geothermal energy, modest size, rainwater collection, nature preserve, all made for a model environmentalist domicile. (This in contrast to the fast talking "green" showman whose mansion burned 20x the national average.)***
Let's don't get carried away with this. The ranch in Texas is basically a 4000 square foot vacation home on a multimillion dollar property. Bush actually lives in an 8000 square foot house (energy efficiency not reported that I can find) near Dallas. Before that, his primary residences were rather luxurious and not especially energy efficient public housing in Austin and Washington DC.
But the Crawford home certainly is nowhere near the monument to excess that the abomination Gore lives in is. In fairness to Gore, as nearly as I can tell, he didn't build the place and he did do some efficiency upgrades... but still... 10000 square feet with gaslighted driveway and heated swimming pool?
Sometime around 2000 or 2001, I inherited a Windows 98 machine with massive installed cruft. It ran slowly, and did a lot of weird things. Finally, one morning, it finally collapsed. After trying resuscitation to no avail, I grabbed the handiest Windows CD -- which happened to be the initial release of Windows 95. I installed it and was amazed at how quick and responsive the PC (a Pentium of some sort) had become. So I downloaded and installed about two dozen patches. Not only fast, but a lot more stable than I remembered Windows 95 being.
Finally, after a few weeks, I decided to try using fully patched Windows 95 on a minimal machine. So I installed it on my experimental CPU fanless 5x86 (a 133MHz 486 with a heatsink about the size of a beer can) with 16mb of memory. It ran beautifully. It usually went a couple of weeks between reboots -- which is about what my current Linux system can manage before the memory leaks get it. I used it for a number of years until application bloat, application dependence on IE libraries and lack of Windows 9 USB support made continued use impractical. And I liked it. I liked it better than much heftier machines with Windows 98. Lots better than Windows 2K (which I, stupidly in retrospect, tried to configure with a separate admin user -- something which pretty much did not work with the applications then available although no one admitted it at the time). Better than Windows XP. I never tried Vista and don't much care for Windows 7 although I think the latter is at least fairly well crafted, and I have to give Microsoft credit for getting hardware configuration working pretty much right after only 13 or 14 years of trying.
So, my feeling is that Windows peaked somewhere around Windows 95-OSR2 and their single user OS pretty much has been downhill from there. I wonder if Microsoft had decided to continue develop and support an MSDOS core OS separate from their server/workstation OS, and had abandoned failed experiments like the Registry and IE integration as soon as their flaws were recognized, if they might not have an OS today that was competitive on todays low powered, performance limited, personal devices.
I don't think that most drivers even know they have ABS and I doubt that it much affects their driving. Which is to say that 20 or 30% of them drive like idiots whether they have ABS or not.
But you are correct. Ever since these expensive, ineffective, systems first started appearing on cars, insurance companies have been telling us that accident statistics for ABS equipped vehicles are virtually identical with similar/identical cars without ABS. Doesn't matter. It sounds good and people -- even those who should know better -- just assume that ABS prevents or moderates accidents. Whereas for the most part all it actually does is increase vehicle purchase and maintenance costs.
At last a challenger to onetime New Hampshire governor Meldrim Thomson as the craziest governor ever. Amongst numerous bizarre actions and ideas, Thomson wanted to arm the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons.
**I'm missing something here. A PDF reader shouldn't let a PDF file anywhere near executable code, should it?***
Not a stupid question although it'll probably get treated as such. My understanding is that PDF is sort of an partial encapsulation of Postscript and therefore can include some kinds of executable code. Personally, I've never much cared for pdf/postscript which have always seemed to me to be a maximal grief approach to getting a document (possibly) printed... if the stars are right and the force is with you.
***Don't trust Daily Mail interpretations of any thing scientific. Or non-scientific.***
I think you've nailed it. The article appears to be horribly garbled. FWIW, the earliest bacterial fossils are 3.8 billion years old. Fossilized microbial mats are quite common back for hundreds of millions of years before the first animals appeared. Some complex fossils -- probably multicellular colonial assembleges (but maybe not 'animals') of one sort or another -- Chuaria, Tawuia, Grypania --go back a very long time. I think that the oldest previously well established animals are whatever created tracks thru the sediments of the fossil assemblege at Fortune Head Newfoundland 595 million years ago.
***Most dating methods that are used routinely are accurate***
True, but unhelpful. Dating techniques useful for dating rocks deposited millions of years ago mostly depend on the use of "index fossils" (fossils that are widely distributed but change enough over time to pin a date down fairly closely.) Less commonly, radiometric dating can be used, but that requires that an event (typically volcanic) reset the atomic clocks in the rocks in question to zero. Since pouring lava over a fossil tends to destroy it, radiometrically dateable fossils aren't all that common. There are a few fossils found between lava flows or buried in volcanic ash that can be dated with fair precision. One especially important set is a collection of difficult to interpret fossils from 595Ma at Fortune Head Newfoundland.
Maybe in Latvia or Nepal. In the US, confusion is an element. Johnson and Johnson's trademark on Band-Aid in no way constrains Stephen Ambrose or Randy Shifts from writing books called respectively "Band of Brothers" and "The Band Played On".
May I be the first to nominate Rupert Murdoch as capitan of mankind's first interstellar expedition? No way to get the explorers back once they are launched? Yeah, I knew that. (I also nominate Donald Trump as first officer).
The number of things wrong with the article summary almost defies imagination. As you've pointed out, Portugal is a small country -- about the size of Maine or Indiana. It has ten million people and a remarkably benign climate (the record low in Lisbon is 30F. The record high a bit over 100F) that results in virtually no use of energy for heating and cooling. It had one of the lowest, if not the lowest, per capita use of energy of any developed country BEFORE upgrading it's energy infrastructure.
They also have -- as the article does point out -- very high energy costs, which means that renewable energy projects that might be economic disasters in the US or Canada are economically viable in Portugal.
It's NOT a typical country.
Moreover, Portugal is in no way, shape or form a net energy exporter. The still import very large amounts of North African oil and gas. They export a very small amount of electricity sometimes.
One suspects that their success in dealing with wind power is due more to the very high amount of (imported) natural gas powered electric generation rather than hydro or pumped storage. The natural gas plants can easily be modulated to match load to demand and to accept the full amount of power generated by renewable sources.
This is not to denigrate their accomplishments in getting useful amounts of renewable power on line and in upgrading their power grid. But comparing their energy infrastructure with that of the US is virtually meaningless.
***The intellectual basis of all economics rely on rationality of actors, Keynesianism included.***
In no way shape or form. You need to read up on Keynesianism and to do a little work on the difference between rationality and predictability. It seems to be possible to predict behavior (especially, but not limited to, foolish behavior) without understanding it and certainly without thinking it is rational.
Zoning and planning is what keeps your neighbor from putting a fireworks factory in his garage. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster. In the case of pools, it generally requires that you have a childproof fence around your pool. If you feel that's an unconscionable infringement on your precious liberties, perhaps you ought to move to someplace extremely remote where you will not be a menace to the rest of us.
***I'm one of those crackpots that think land ownership should be meaningful, and that if you want to control something, you should have to own it first. Radical, I know.**
I think that I'd use the word 'demented' rather than 'radical'.
I think so also. But as an old Fortran programmer, I'd suggest a two step approach. First do a couple of slightly more than trivial programs in C and Python. C because it is a poorly readable Fortran like language with a (very) few niceties. Not much of a learning curve. Even though it is poorly unsuited to large systems, it is exactly what is used to produce many large systems. The code is produced is insecure and doesn't work all that well, but what the hell, it worked once and must be ready to ship. Many "modern" languages use C-like syntax. Python because it is easy to learn and, unlike c, builds in some genuinely useful concepts not present in Fortran -- lists, hashes, objects. Python also allows rather remarkable programmer access to the internals of the internals of the language. Don't like the way lists work? Change it.
Once comfortable with C and Python. Pick the language one really wants to work with -- presumably based on market factors -- and learn it.
***The U.S. can't just build enormous nuke plants and send power by wire across the country without serious losses on the line.***
You sure about that? I tried to research transmission line losses recently, and came up with a rather hazy 3-8%. And we already do routinely send electricity many hundreds of kilometers -- as, for example, from Boulder Dam to Southern California. Do you have a reference for higher losses? Seriously, I'd like to read it.
Nuclear plants will generally be built within a few hundred kilometers of their loads. Wouldn't make lot of sense to build one in One Tree Gulch North Dakota unless there are users nearby.
If your point is that the US power grid probably can't handle a major buildout of electric power of any sort, I fear you are probably correct. But that applies equally to wind, solar and nuclear.
***I am therefore not impressed with the 0.16,USD/kWh quoted. It' s almost 3 times more expensive than what the French can get, without even trying to be cost-effective.***
Dead on. The article has many numbers, none of which seem to be consistent with either reality or each other. As of last December, Vermont utilities were paying Vermont Yankee which is about 100 miles down the road from the author 4.2 cents/kwhr and Entergy was trying to wheedle an increase to 6.1 cents.
I'm not against solar power or wind, or cogeneration or any other sane non-fossil fuel based technology for meeting energy needs. But this report appears to me to be 100% pure Vermont cow manure. Based on what I can see, it's best and highest use would be to burn all the copies for heat next winter. Winters in this part of the world are a bit nippy.
(And solar probably is not a 16cent/kwh hour choice for Vermont anyway. Too far from the equator, too much cloud cover, and for three or four months of the year, snow would have to be mechanically removed from the collectors. Now for Honolulu, Barstow, Tucson, or Las Vegas...)
**Assange isn't a journalist, he is an activist with an agenda to demonize the US.***
Let me see if I have this straight. Journalism consists of telling the story you want people to hear and no more. It's a point of view, but a pretty sorry one if you ask me.
May I suggest that it is long past time to take your value system in for an overhaul?
Of course you can write a trojan -- or any other sort of malware -- targeted at Unix. Unix has the same architecture and pretty much the same vulnerable technologies as NT based Windows. But so far, few people have bothered. But for the time being, security through obscurity -- plus the difficulty of writing low level code that works reliably with seventy or so different Unix distributions -- protects Unix users.
That won't last of course.
Prediction: First we'll see malware targeting Ubuntu. Then malware targeting all Unixes. Then malware that has Unix, MacOS and Unix versions all tidily packaged together.
***Cellphones are line of sight around the 2ghz range, they stink without a repeater nearby.***
In theory, you're right. However, in practice, I've found cell phones to be better than I expected. A number of times, I've been able to get a bar or two in places where I had expected that cell phone reception would be hopeless (e.g. Marjum Pass in Utah's House Mountains). Often it requires walking around a bit and holding the phone in various positions in order to find enough signal to check in and tell the folks at home that everything is fine. Cell phones usually don't work from the bottom of steep walled canyons of course, but I have my doubts that anything without some power and a real antenna will work reliably in those.
***We run the friggen planet with with software we write! Most of the Planet can't even change their oil or tune of their car! ***
You haven't had to tune a car -- or indeed had anything to tune -- for about two decades. The last manual adjustment I can think of was the idle control. It vanished from cars sold in the US around 1990.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Slashdot mate. It's OK to program in BASIC as long as you rename the interpreter to PYTHON.EXE instead of BASIC.EXE. Trust me. Most of the people who dis BASIC, FORTRAN and COBOL wouldn't be able to tell whether you were programming in BASIC, Perl, or APL even if they saw the code.
***I don't see that there's any niche for a netbook.. unless you really really want a proper laptop and you can't afford one.. because netbooks are just cheap laptops.***
You might want to talk to my wife. She uses her computers for four things -- playing FreeCell, reading e-books, eMail, and web surfing. Her netbook does all those things well. She loves it.
Until we get tablets with real keyboards with tactile feedback, I'm pretty sure that they are not going to replace her netbook.
If you're referring to prohibition in the US, doctors wrote prescriptions for one pint of whiskey not beer. The prescriptions could be filled at drugstores. ISTR that one of our national drugstore chains in the US got its start in the prohibition era as an outlet for prescription whisky, but I could have that wrong.
======
As for three drinks a day keeps the doctor away, I'd like to suggest the possibility that keeping doctors and other medical professionals at a substantial distance might have more positive effect on longevity than how much ethanol one consumes.
***What's fascinating right off the bat is I don't think many public schools here in the U.S. would institute lesson plans involving free and open-source software.. most use and/or are funded by commercial software.***
No so actually, but there is too much software required by teachers, staff etc that runs even worse under OSS than it does under Windows for OSS to really be viable. Programmers and their managers have created an utter shambles because of their inability to promulgate meaningful standards and -- if they actually manage a coherent standard -- to adhere to it. As a result, school IT people stumble along using the least unacceptable common element -- Windows XP -- and Internet Explorer or maybe Firefox and trying, with varying degrees of success, to work around the very numerous problems resulting from the use of this ill-crafted junk.
About the best you can say today for OSS vs Windows is that at least the OSS folks don't have the audacity to charge for their product.
Will all this change? I used to hope so. I'm beginning to suspect not. ... Maybe when personal communication devices eventually replace PCs on school and office desktops. But I doubt it. IT folks and their bosses apparently were created by God with lots of brains but no common sense. I don't see that changing unless and until the entire IT world implodes because the software and interfaces thereto have become either unmaintainable and/or too insecure for serious use. (And yes, I think that either or both could happen)
All that may be true -- and good for your eighth grader. Nonetheless, presenting a class of anything other than budding geniuses with the most notoriously user unfriendly interface in the Open Source world seems imprudent. Maybe Kolourpaint instead of the Gimp?
***What exactly is the point of jetpacks supposed to be? ***
There will be some uses for them. Carrying cables across canyons; access to otherwise difficult locations; maybe even some rescue operations eventually. But they are likely to be noisy, dangerous, to have limited load capability. The experimental devices built in the past are said to have a history of leg and leg joint injuries.
***Seems the much maligned president owned, with little fanfare, a rather "green" home. Passive solar heating, natural cooling, geothermal energy, modest size, rainwater collection, nature preserve, all made for a model environmentalist domicile. (This in contrast to the fast talking "green" showman whose mansion burned 20x the national average.)***
Let's don't get carried away with this. The ranch in Texas is basically a 4000 square foot vacation home on a multimillion dollar property. Bush actually lives in an 8000 square foot house (energy efficiency not reported that I can find) near Dallas. Before that, his primary residences were rather luxurious and not especially energy efficient public housing in Austin and Washington DC.
But the Crawford home certainly is nowhere near the monument to excess that the abomination Gore lives in is. In fairness to Gore, as nearly as I can tell, he didn't build the place and he did do some efficiency upgrades ... but still ... 10000 square feet with gaslighted driveway and heated swimming pool?
Sometime around 2000 or 2001, I inherited a Windows 98 machine with massive installed cruft. It ran slowly, and did a lot of weird things. Finally, one morning, it finally collapsed. After trying resuscitation to no avail, I grabbed the handiest Windows CD -- which happened to be the initial release of Windows 95. I installed it and was amazed at how quick and responsive the PC (a Pentium of some sort) had become. So I downloaded and installed about two dozen patches. Not only fast, but a lot more stable than I remembered Windows 95 being.
Finally, after a few weeks, I decided to try using fully patched Windows 95 on a minimal machine. So I installed it on my experimental CPU fanless 5x86 (a 133MHz 486 with a heatsink about the size of a beer can) with 16mb of memory. It ran beautifully. It usually went a couple of weeks between reboots -- which is about what my current Linux system can manage before the memory leaks get it. I used it for a number of years until application bloat, application dependence on IE libraries and lack of Windows 9 USB support made continued use impractical. And I liked it. I liked it better than much heftier machines with Windows 98. Lots better than Windows 2K (which I, stupidly in retrospect, tried to configure with a separate admin user -- something which pretty much did not work with the applications then available although no one admitted it at the time). Better than Windows XP. I never tried Vista and don't much care for Windows 7 although I think the latter is at least fairly well crafted, and I have to give Microsoft credit for getting hardware configuration working pretty much right after only 13 or 14 years of trying.
So, my feeling is that Windows peaked somewhere around Windows 95-OSR2 and their single user OS pretty much has been downhill from there. I wonder if Microsoft had decided to continue develop and support an MSDOS core OS separate from their server/workstation OS, and had abandoned failed experiments like the Registry and IE integration as soon as their flaws were recognized, if they might not have an OS today that was competitive on todays low powered, performance limited, personal devices.
I don't think that most drivers even know they have ABS and I doubt that it much affects their driving. Which is to say that 20 or 30% of them drive like idiots whether they have ABS or not.
But you are correct. Ever since these expensive, ineffective, systems first started appearing on cars, insurance companies have been telling us that accident statistics for ABS equipped vehicles are virtually identical with similar/identical cars without ABS. Doesn't matter. It sounds good and people -- even those who should know better -- just assume that ABS prevents or moderates accidents. Whereas for the most part all it actually does is increase vehicle purchase and maintenance costs.
At last a challenger to onetime New Hampshire governor Meldrim Thomson as the craziest governor ever. Amongst numerous bizarre actions and ideas, Thomson wanted to arm the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meldrim_Thomson,_Jr.
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/apr/20/local/me-53359
**I'm missing something here. A PDF reader shouldn't let a PDF file anywhere near executable code, should it?***
Not a stupid question although it'll probably get treated as such. My understanding is that PDF is sort of an partial encapsulation of Postscript and therefore can include some kinds of executable code. Personally, I've never much cared for pdf/postscript which have always seemed to me to be a maximal grief approach to getting a document (possibly) printed ... if the stars are right and the force is with you.
***Don't trust Daily Mail interpretations of any thing scientific. Or non-scientific.***
I think you've nailed it. The article appears to be horribly garbled. FWIW, the earliest bacterial fossils are 3.8 billion years old. Fossilized microbial mats are quite common back for hundreds of millions of years before the first animals appeared. Some complex fossils -- probably multicellular colonial assembleges (but maybe not 'animals') of one sort or another -- Chuaria, Tawuia, Grypania --go back a very long time. I think that the oldest previously well established animals are whatever created tracks thru the sediments of the fossil assemblege at Fortune Head Newfoundland 595 million years ago.
***Most dating methods that are used routinely are accurate***
True, but unhelpful. Dating techniques useful for dating rocks deposited millions of years ago mostly depend on the use of "index fossils" (fossils that are widely distributed but change enough over time to pin a date down fairly closely.) Less commonly, radiometric dating can be used, but that requires that an event (typically volcanic) reset the atomic clocks in the rocks in question to zero. Since pouring lava over a fossil tends to destroy it, radiometrically dateable fossils aren't all that common. There are a few fossils found between lava flows or buried in volcanic ash that can be dated with fair precision. One especially important set is a collection of difficult to interpret fossils from 595Ma at Fortune Head Newfoundland.
***No, according to the Supreme Court, in order to be a parody it must poke fun at the original***
Oh, OK. So if he changes the logo so that it explicitly makes fun of the Geek Squad, that'll be legal and everyone will be happy?
Has the public at long last found a real weapon to use against over-reaching IP lawyers?
***Trademarks are not about confusion.***
Maybe in Latvia or Nepal. In the US, confusion is an element. Johnson and Johnson's trademark on Band-Aid in no way constrains Stephen Ambrose or Randy Shifts from writing books called respectively "Band of Brothers" and "The Band Played On".
May I be the first to nominate Rupert Murdoch as capitan of mankind's first interstellar expedition? No way to get the explorers back once they are launched? Yeah, I knew that. (I also nominate Donald Trump as first officer).
The number of things wrong with the article summary almost defies imagination. As you've pointed out, Portugal is a small country -- about the size of Maine or Indiana. It has ten million people and a remarkably benign climate (the record low in Lisbon is 30F. The record high a bit over 100F) that results in virtually no use of energy for heating and cooling. It had one of the lowest, if not the lowest, per capita use of energy of any developed country BEFORE upgrading it's energy infrastructure.
They also have -- as the article does point out -- very high energy costs, which means that renewable energy projects that might be economic disasters in the US or Canada are economically viable in Portugal.
It's NOT a typical country.
Moreover, Portugal is in no way, shape or form a net energy exporter. The still import very large amounts of North African oil and gas. They export a very small amount of electricity sometimes.
One suspects that their success in dealing with wind power is due more to the very high amount of (imported) natural gas powered electric generation rather than hydro or pumped storage. The natural gas plants can easily be modulated to match load to demand and to accept the full amount of power generated by renewable sources.
This is not to denigrate their accomplishments in getting useful amounts of renewable power on line and in upgrading their power grid. But comparing their energy infrastructure with that of the US is virtually meaningless.
***The intellectual basis of all economics rely on rationality of actors, Keynesianism included.***
In no way shape or form. You need to read up on Keynesianism and to do a little work on the difference between rationality and predictability. It seems to be possible to predict behavior (especially, but not limited to, foolish behavior) without understanding it and certainly without thinking it is rational.
Zoning and planning is what keeps your neighbor from putting a fireworks factory in his garage. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster. In the case of pools, it generally requires that you have a childproof fence around your pool. If you feel that's an unconscionable infringement on your precious liberties, perhaps you ought to move to someplace extremely remote where you will not be a menace to the rest of us.
***I'm one of those crackpots that think land ownership should be meaningful, and that if you want to control something, you should have to own it first. Radical, I know.**
I think that I'd use the word 'demented' rather than 'radical'.
***I think this is a very sound response.***
I think so also. But as an old Fortran programmer, I'd suggest a two step approach. First do a couple of slightly more than trivial programs in C and Python. C because it is a poorly readable Fortran like language with a (very) few niceties. Not much of a learning curve. Even though it is poorly unsuited to large systems, it is exactly what is used to produce many large systems. The code is produced is insecure and doesn't work all that well, but what the hell, it worked once and must be ready to ship. Many "modern" languages use C-like syntax. Python because it is easy to learn and, unlike c, builds in some genuinely useful concepts not present in Fortran -- lists, hashes, objects. Python also allows rather remarkable programmer access to the internals of the internals of the language. Don't like the way lists work? Change it.
Once comfortable with C and Python. Pick the language one really wants to work with -- presumably based on market factors -- and learn it.
***The U.S. can't just build enormous nuke plants and send power by wire across the country without serious losses on the line.***
You sure about that? I tried to research transmission line losses recently, and came up with a rather hazy 3-8%. And we already do routinely send electricity many hundreds of kilometers -- as, for example, from Boulder Dam to Southern California. Do you have a reference for higher losses? Seriously, I'd like to read it.
Nuclear plants will generally be built within a few hundred kilometers of their loads. Wouldn't make lot of sense to build one in One Tree Gulch North Dakota unless there are users nearby.
If your point is that the US power grid probably can't handle a major buildout of electric power of any sort, I fear you are probably correct. But that applies equally to wind, solar and nuclear.
***I am therefore not impressed with the 0.16,USD/kWh quoted. It' s almost 3 times more expensive than what the French can get, without even trying to be cost-effective.***
Dead on. The article has many numbers, none of which seem to be consistent with either reality or each other. As of last December, Vermont utilities were paying Vermont Yankee which is about 100 miles down the road from the author 4.2 cents/kwhr and Entergy was trying to wheedle an increase to 6.1 cents.
I'm not against solar power or wind, or cogeneration or any other sane non-fossil fuel based technology for meeting energy needs. But this report appears to me to be 100% pure Vermont cow manure. Based on what I can see, it's best and highest use would be to burn all the copies for heat next winter. Winters in this part of the world are a bit nippy.
(And solar probably is not a 16cent/kwh hour choice for Vermont anyway. Too far from the equator, too much cloud cover, and for three or four months of the year, snow would have to be mechanically removed from the collectors. Now for Honolulu, Barstow, Tucson, or Las Vegas ...)
**Assange isn't a journalist, he is an activist with an agenda to demonize the US.***
Let me see if I have this straight. Journalism consists of telling the story you want people to hear and no more. It's a point of view, but a pretty sorry one if you ask me.
May I suggest that it is long past time to take your value system in for an overhaul?
Of course you can write a trojan -- or any other sort of malware -- targeted at Unix. Unix has the same architecture and pretty much the same vulnerable technologies as NT based Windows. But so far, few people have bothered. But for the time being, security through obscurity -- plus the difficulty of writing low level code that works reliably with seventy or so different Unix distributions -- protects Unix users.
That won't last of course.
Prediction: First we'll see malware targeting Ubuntu. Then malware targeting all Unixes. Then malware that has Unix, MacOS and Unix versions all tidily packaged together.
***Cellphones are line of sight around the 2ghz range, they stink without a repeater nearby.***
In theory, you're right. However, in practice, I've found cell phones to be better than I expected. A number of times, I've been able to get a bar or two in places where I had expected that cell phone reception would be hopeless (e.g. Marjum Pass in Utah's House Mountains). Often it requires walking around a bit and holding the phone in various positions in order to find enough signal to check in and tell the folks at home that everything is fine. Cell phones usually don't work from the bottom of steep walled canyons of course, but I have my doubts that anything without some power and a real antenna will work reliably in those.
***We run the friggen planet with with software we write! Most of the Planet can't even change their oil or tune of their car! ***
You haven't had to tune a car -- or indeed had anything to tune -- for about two decades. The last manual adjustment I can think of was the idle control. It vanished from cars sold in the US around 1990.