We already are discovering that the practice of cracking voicemail boxes of fools (who never set a pin or set a totally lame one) was a widespread practive in the british tabloid press
They hacked by spoofing their caller ID when calling the voicemailbox number. The service didn't prompt for a PIN, and you could hardly blame the user for that attack.
(I don't have any idea what the rest of you comment is about, I'm not American.)
Why is apologizing for how underwhelming the US rail system a good point?
On another point.. there is a huge problem with high speed rail in developed countries.
You should probably say "in the USA", since the situation is very different in Europe and Japan, and there's no evidence for what will/might happen in North America (or elsewhere).
What tends to happen in Europe is the new high speed train route captures a significant part of the market, although some planes still fly the route, probably with transfer passengers. It should be simple for the airlines to plan for this.
Building anything new (or upgrading something) changes the market, whether that's a new railway, road or runway.
I don't fly very often (maybe 4 times a year), but I recently used Terminal 5 twice (and twice coming back). It was OK -- no queues, even for the 7:20am flight, lots of room to sit, lots of shops (etc) to avoid immediate boredom on the secure side, excellent signs, reasonably quiet. The only downside was the flights being delayed, apparently short-mid European flights are often delayed as they have a low priority.
It's still an airport, and not somewhere I'd choose to go, but for one of the busiest airports in the world I think they're doing pretty well.
When I swap the SIM in my Android phone I'm prompted to re-enter the password for my Google accounts (but not others, like Facebook, Last.fm, Exchange etc). There must be something going on, but I'm not going to guess.
Here is a British landline phone + ADSL bill (though the ADSL isn't explicitly mentioned, it's part of the "Max Unlimited Plus Free Weekend Part II" package). It's complete, apart from the page containing two lines saying payment will be taken from my account automatically on a particular day unless I tell them not to, before some other day. The whole thing was four sides of A4.
It's a little old, as I don't have a phone line any more. We didn't use the phone much, so the call detail isn't very long, but it's still clear what each call is. Usually, I could look at the summary by call type, see that nothing was over £1, and ignore the rest.
(I kept that one because of the £11 call to New Zealand. Up to 60 minute calls were free to NZ (and many other countries), but someone else in the student house made a 64 minute call. Normally, we were paying £14/month for phone + 8Mbit/s ADSL + unlimited UK landline calls + evening/weekend up-to-1hr international calls to western Europe, the US, NZ etc.)
Yeah... last time I went to Glasgow I was hugged/leant on by a friendly drunk. I think she was about 11... the other children said stuff, but I couldn't understand them.
(I'm English, and I'm pretty sure it's not much worse than England. But I like Scotland, it feels happier than England. I'd move, except for the weather.)
The languages you describe are imperative (briefly: you provide instructions on how to manipulate the computer's memory to solve your problem). Factorial function: input n r = 1 while (n > 1) {
r = r * n;
n = n - 1 } output r
The other reply mentions Haskell, a functional language. You provide a mathematical function, which the computer executes to solve the problem. factorial 1 = 1 factorial n = n * factorial (n-1)
Another example is something like Prolog, a logic-based language. You provide a set of true statements, and the computer 'reasons' (solves) them to find a solution. [Yeah... I don't remember much Prolog... copied from the web: ] factorial(0,1).
factorial(N,F):-
N>0,
N1 is N-1,
factorial(N1,F1),
F is N * F1.
Javascript can be used the imperative or the functional way. I'll leave that to you to figure out:-)
Seriously though, I think this has to be a very introductory course for CS students with zero programming experience or a light course for non CS students.
I would have thought the latter. It has some very basic stuff.
My university started with Haskell (course page inc. lecture notes). I think part of the intention was to trip up all the know-it-alls, who (of course) didn't know as much as they thought. The notes dive straight in to dealing with basic types, functions, etc.
Javascript is a functional language, but that's not how most people use it, and I don't think you could teach a course using it this way. When I was in third (fourth?) year I was an assistant for the first-year Haskell lab work, and for the first few hours some of the students who'd done a little programming would try and write something imperative-ish in Haskell; before they realised they needed to think in a different way.
I remember my first job interview. "Give me a book and a couple weeks" was the answer to "We think you'll be a good fit, but what other languages can you program in."
My first interview went like that all the way through. I hadn't heard of any of the stuff they used (except Java), but assumed it wouldn't be a problem. Although instead of the book I was given a small, real project to "learn" on... which got deployed, but has no reported bugs. (It was pretty simple, although it looked shiny and new compared to everything else, so I got way too much credit. Or else I'm too modest, who knows.)
We obviously need to separate the driver from the passengers too- conversations with passengers is probably responsible for 60% of the other wrecks.
I don't drive, but I'm often a passenger. Since I was old enough to sit in the front seat I've somehow known when not to talk to the driver -- there are subtle (and less subtle) signals. A busy junction with the driver reading all the signs and working out what lane, or him pausing before replying, or just saying "hang on...".
There's also the second pair of eyes -- my shout when I was about 13 alerted my dad to a speeding (ridiculously) car as he was about to pull out of a junction.
Wouldn't I have to sign up to the service to discover what they're doing with my non-Google+ profile? I hear that if you have a public Google Profile then you can be added to the "circle" of a Google+ user.
Any email address can be added to a "circle". When I joined, the suggestions were all taken from my Google (GMail) address book, split into people already in Google+ and others. Either public Google Profiles are in with the others, or none of my contacts have one.
I have no idea if others can see that someone has added my profile to their circle.
The contents of circles is private. That was made quite clear while setting up the account.
So far as I'm aware, Facebook has never done anything like this.. pulled in profile information from other services to add to their social network. I expect the inevitable result of this will be an automated service to badger me to join.. or just an attractive slippery slope of integration.
(Black and white video of a duck's penis; it was a meme a while ago. Not at all shocking, could start an interesting office conversation.)
Yeah, probably with HR!
Oh, quite possibly, for some people.
But the organisation I work for does (roughly) biological research, so it'd be OK. I think it was one of the placement students that sent that video round the office, but with a subject line like "look how duck penises have evolved -- crazy!"
Strange coincidence: a talkative colleague on the other side of the office just said to someone "no, the first time I got drunk I was 18". The people around him said "what, really?!" (and 18 is the legal purchase age for alcohol here).
Why should an employer care? Everyone (else) drank before they were 18, no one seems to be any better or worse at their jobs because of it.
Why would you think that a small box you find is a bomb? No, seriously - why the fuck would you think that?
UK People of a certain age look upon any strange object as a possible threat because of years and years of the IRA (and more latterly the RIRA) leaving bombs in rubbish bins (AKA "trash cans) and the like.
And "certain age" can be as young as "early-mid 20s". My school was evacuated three times while I was attending -- it was very close to the centre of the city (pop. 300k). At least one of them was real (but successfully defused) according to a Google search.
Most American chocolate contains some soured milk, which includes butyric acid, also found in vomit. There's nothing wrong with that*, but it's certainly not a taste or smell I'd be expecting in chocolate. At work, whenever someone visits a foreign country they bring back a sweet snack food (biscuits, sweets, chocolates). Usually they don't last more than a week, but American chocolate typically gets thrown out after a couple of months. It's presumably an acquired taste.
* Soured milk in chocolate is nothing to feel superior about. Have you seen some of the things "we" eat? Lutefisk... surströmming... Marmite (etc)...
Ooh, ooh, and some way to simulate jumping onto the pavement at speed and then running down an old lady. Exervise the skills we'll actually use in the real world!
So far I've only managed to hit a child* and near-miss a woman**, but I'm practising all the time:-|
* He ran out into the road, but I'd 98% stopped by the time I hit him; fortunately he wasn't hurt. (He apologised a lot in French, so maybe he looked the wrong way before stepping out (or maybe not). Another time I was on a bus that hit an American at night (4am) in central London on Valentine's Day. He'd walked out looking the wrong way, according to his distraught girlfriend. He wasn't OK, blood and cuts and probably broken bones... but the medics in the ambulance thought he'd be OK eventually.)
** A 2+2 lane road, with an island for pedestrians to cross in the middle (by traffic lights). She dashed out from the island against the "red man", into the path of a car, then screamed and ran further into the road -- in front of me. I'd only bought the bike a couple of days earlier, and was seeing how fast I could go on the steep slope of the nearest big, wide road. I was very pleased with the bike's disc brakes -- fortunately, I'd already spent a little time learning how they responded (very well!), otherwise I'd have gone over the handlebars.
(11000km so far of going-to-work-and-the-shops-and-back-and-occasionally-the-pub in London, so I think it's OK.)
Slightly more on topic, I think part of the British driving test (which I've not taken) is to do "hazard perception", and is a video which requires the learner driver to point out things like playful children at the side of the road, people waiting at crossings, where they become hazards (unofficial online version)
You know who else uses British Thermal Units? The British.
We don't.
Wikipedia says it's used a lot for air conditioning. The figures given in the brochures here: http://www.toshiba-aircon.co.uk/ and in kilowatts (for residential and commercial units), and electric heaters are specified in kW too. I've never seen BTU except on Slashdot.
Even more ironic: US measuring energy in British units... (like they never heard of FFF).
I don't think many people in Britain would have much idea what a BTU is. I don't. We wouldn't use "quadrillion" either -- especially in a serious publication! Instead, the peta- prefix, or perhaps thousands of giga- for something meant for the public.
We use watts. After trying to convert, I see that BTUs measure energy, not energy transfer, so we'd use joules or [giga]watt-hours.
Google says 2.245 * 10^15 BTU / 3 months in gigawatts = 300GW. Now I'm impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
We already are discovering that the practice of cracking voicemail boxes of fools (who never set a pin or set a totally lame one) was a widespread practive in the british tabloid press
They hacked by spoofing their caller ID when calling the voicemailbox number. The service didn't prompt for a PIN, and you could hardly blame the user for that attack.
(I don't have any idea what the rest of you comment is about, I'm not American.)
Why is apologizing for how underwhelming the US rail system a good point?
On another point.. there is a huge problem with high speed rail in developed countries.
You should probably say "in the USA", since the situation is very different in Europe and Japan, and there's no evidence for what will/might happen in North America (or elsewhere).
What tends to happen in Europe is the new high speed train route captures a significant part of the market, although some planes still fly the route, probably with transfer passengers. It should be simple for the airlines to plan for this.
Building anything new (or upgrading something) changes the market, whether that's a new railway, road or runway.
I don't fly very often (maybe 4 times a year), but I recently used Terminal 5 twice (and twice coming back). It was OK -- no queues, even for the 7:20am flight, lots of room to sit, lots of shops (etc) to avoid immediate boredom on the secure side, excellent signs, reasonably quiet. The only downside was the flights being delayed, apparently short-mid European flights are often delayed as they have a low priority.
It's still an airport, and not somewhere I'd choose to go, but for one of the busiest airports in the world I think they're doing pretty well.
When I swap the SIM in my Android phone I'm prompted to re-enter the password for my Google accounts (but not others, like Facebook, Last.fm, Exchange etc). There must be something going on, but I'm not going to guess.
Here is a British landline phone + ADSL bill (though the ADSL isn't explicitly mentioned, it's part of the "Max Unlimited Plus Free Weekend Part II" package). It's complete, apart from the page containing two lines saying payment will be taken from my account automatically on a particular day unless I tell them not to, before some other day. The whole thing was four sides of A4.
It's a little old, as I don't have a phone line any more. We didn't use the phone much, so the call detail isn't very long, but it's still clear what each call is.
Usually, I could look at the summary by call type, see that nothing was over £1, and ignore the rest.
(I kept that one because of the £11 call to New Zealand. Up to 60 minute calls were free to NZ (and many other countries), but someone else in the student house made a 64 minute call. Normally, we were paying £14/month for phone + 8Mbit/s ADSL + unlimited UK landline calls + evening/weekend up-to-1hr international calls to western Europe, the US, NZ etc.)
Yeah, they're mostly friendly drunks.
Yeah... last time I went to Glasgow I was hugged/leant on by a friendly drunk. I think she was about 11... the other children said stuff, but I couldn't understand them.
(I'm English, and I'm pretty sure it's not much worse than England. But I like Scotland, it feels happier than England. I'd move, except for the weather.)
50 random people, that's enough. There should be 50 more people ready to hand out invites.
I just invited all the addresses without a parent post. I don't think there's a limit on the number of people you can invite.
Invited.
I think you should read this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm
The languages you describe are imperative (briefly: you provide instructions on how to manipulate the computer's memory to solve your problem).
Factorial function:
input n
r = 1
while (n > 1) {
r = r * n;
n = n - 1
}
output r
The other reply mentions Haskell, a functional language. You provide a mathematical function, which the computer executes to solve the problem.
factorial 1 = 1
factorial n = n * factorial (n-1)
Another example is something like Prolog, a logic-based language. You provide a set of true statements, and the computer 'reasons' (solves) them to find a solution.
[Yeah... I don't remember much Prolog... copied from the web: ]
factorial(0,1).
factorial(N,F) :-
N>0,
N1 is N-1,
factorial(N1,F1),
F is N * F1.
Javascript can be used the imperative or the functional way. I'll leave that to you to figure out :-)
Seriously though, I think this has to be a very introductory course for CS students with zero programming experience or a light course for non CS students.
I would have thought the latter. It has some very basic stuff.
My university started with Haskell (course page inc. lecture notes). I think part of the intention was to trip up all the know-it-alls, who (of course) didn't know as much as they thought. The notes dive straight in to dealing with basic types, functions, etc.
Javascript is a functional language, but that's not how most people use it, and I don't think you could teach a course using it this way. When I was in third (fourth?) year I was an assistant for the first-year Haskell lab work, and for the first few hours some of the students who'd done a little programming would try and write something imperative-ish in Haskell; before they realised they needed to think in a different way.
I remember my first job interview. "Give me a book and a couple weeks" was the answer to "We think you'll be a good fit, but what other languages can you program in."
My first interview went like that all the way through. I hadn't heard of any of the stuff they used (except Java), but assumed it wouldn't be a problem. Although instead of the book I was given a small, real project to "learn" on... which got deployed, but has no reported bugs. (It was pretty simple, although it looked shiny and new compared to everything else, so I got way too much credit. Or else I'm too modest, who knows.)
We obviously need to separate the driver from the passengers too- conversations with passengers is probably responsible for 60% of the other wrecks.
I don't drive, but I'm often a passenger. Since I was old enough to sit in the front seat I've somehow known when not to talk to the driver -- there are subtle (and less subtle) signals. A busy junction with the driver reading all the signs and working out what lane, or him pausing before replying, or just saying "hang on...".
There's also the second pair of eyes -- my shout when I was about 13 alerted my dad to a speeding (ridiculously) car as he was about to pull out of a junction.
Someone on the end of a phone misses all this.
One of the nice features of Facebook is that if you go to Account > Privacy Settings > Customise Settings then you can find a button labelled "Preview my Profile"
Google+ has a similar option (while editing your profile you can choose to see the profile as any circle/user/anonymous user would see it).
Wouldn't I have to sign up to the service to discover what they're doing with my non-Google+ profile? I hear that if you have a public Google Profile then you can be added to the "circle" of a Google+ user.
Any email address can be added to a "circle". When I joined, the suggestions were all taken from my Google (GMail) address book, split into people already in Google+ and others. Either public Google Profiles are in with the others, or none of my contacts have one.
I have no idea if others can see that someone has added my profile to their circle.
The contents of circles is private. That was made quite clear while setting up the account.
So far as I'm aware, Facebook has never done anything like this.. pulled in profile information from other services to add to their social network. I expect the inevitable result of this will be an automated service to badger me to join.. or just an attractive slippery slope of integration.
AIUI you can opt out completely.
but "city limits" has a different meaning in most countries. In some it's just the city centre, in others the whole sprawl.
I know people here in the UK who have refused to sell to interested Americans as they then risk being sued in the USA. Not racist.
(Black and white video of a duck's penis; it was a meme a while ago. Not at all shocking, could start an interesting office conversation.)
Yeah, probably with HR!
Oh, quite possibly, for some people.
But the organisation I work for does (roughly) biological research, so it'd be OK. I think it was one of the placement students that sent that video round the office, but with a subject line like "look how duck penises have evolved -- crazy!"
I have a fetish about duck and I search for duck tube and it found nothing of interest. I still have to commission my duck raping porn....
Here's a start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwjEeI2SmiU
(Black and white video of a duck's penis; it was a meme a while ago. Not at all shocking, could start an interesting office conversation.)
Strange coincidence: a talkative colleague on the other side of the office just said to someone "no, the first time I got drunk I was 18". The people around him said "what, really?!" (and 18 is the legal purchase age for alcohol here).
Why should an employer care? Everyone (else) drank before they were 18, no one seems to be any better or worse at their jobs because of it.
That email address is probably in the publicly available whois data.
Why would you think that a small box you find is a bomb? No, seriously - why the fuck would you think that?
UK People of a certain age look upon any strange object as a possible threat because of years and years of the IRA (and more latterly the RIRA) leaving bombs in rubbish bins (AKA "trash cans) and the like.
And "certain age" can be as young as "early-mid 20s". My school was evacuated three times while I was attending -- it was very close to the centre of the city (pop. 300k). At least one of them was real (but successfully defused) according to a Google search.
Most American chocolate contains some soured milk, which includes butyric acid, also found in vomit. There's nothing wrong with that*, but it's certainly not a taste or smell I'd be expecting in chocolate. At work, whenever someone visits a foreign country they bring back a sweet snack food (biscuits, sweets, chocolates). Usually they don't last more than a week, but American chocolate typically gets thrown out after a couple of months. It's presumably an acquired taste.
* Soured milk in chocolate is nothing to feel superior about. Have you seen some of the things "we" eat? Lutefisk... surströmming... Marmite (etc)...
Ooh, ooh, and some way to simulate jumping onto the pavement at speed and then running down an old lady. Exervise the skills we'll actually use in the real world!
So far I've only managed to hit a child* and near-miss a woman**, but I'm practising all the time :-|
* He ran out into the road, but I'd 98% stopped by the time I hit him; fortunately he wasn't hurt. (He apologised a lot in French, so maybe he looked the wrong way before stepping out (or maybe not). Another time I was on a bus that hit an American at night (4am) in central London on Valentine's Day. He'd walked out looking the wrong way, according to his distraught girlfriend. He wasn't OK, blood and cuts and probably broken bones... but the medics in the ambulance thought he'd be OK eventually.)
** A 2+2 lane road, with an island for pedestrians to cross in the middle (by traffic lights). She dashed out from the island against the "red man", into the path of a car, then screamed and ran further into the road -- in front of me. I'd only bought the bike a couple of days earlier, and was seeing how fast I could go on the steep slope of the nearest big, wide road. I was very pleased with the bike's disc brakes -- fortunately, I'd already spent a little time learning how they responded (very well!), otherwise I'd have gone over the handlebars.
(11000km so far of going-to-work-and-the-shops-and-back-and-occasionally-the-pub in London, so I think it's OK.)
Slightly more on topic, I think part of the British driving test (which I've not taken) is to do "hazard perception", and is a video which requires the learner driver to point out things like playful children at the side of the road, people waiting at crossings, where they become hazards (unofficial online version)
You know who else uses British Thermal Units? The British.
We don't.
Wikipedia says it's used a lot for air conditioning. The figures given in the brochures here: http://www.toshiba-aircon.co.uk/ and in kilowatts (for residential and commercial units), and electric heaters are specified in kW too. I've never seen BTU except on Slashdot.
Even more ironic: US measuring energy in British units... (like they never heard of FFF).
I don't think many people in Britain would have much idea what a BTU is. I don't. We wouldn't use "quadrillion" either -- especially in a serious publication! Instead, the peta- prefix, or perhaps thousands of giga- for something meant for the public.
We use watts. After trying to convert, I see that BTUs measure energy, not energy transfer, so we'd use joules or [giga]watt-hours.
Google says 2.245 * 10^15 BTU / 3 months in gigawatts = 300GW. Now I'm impressed.