I don't think Stonehenge can claim that it is operating though. They still don't know what it was used for. The Pantheon on the other hand is still used as a church. It's a very impressive structure - a dome with a hole in the roof. I'm really curious how they pulled off that engineering trick without heavy machinery,

Stonehenge is just a bunch of rocks standing in a field. It's like comparing CPM with a Symbolics Lisp Machine, no comparison.

It works fine in FreeBSD, just don't use the proprietary drivers.

Here is the magic link: http://masterofpc.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/brother-mfc-7420-under-linux-without-the-proprietary-brother-drivers/

Well one good thing this shows is that gas economy is at least seen as an attractive quality. They wouldn't falsify it if they didn't think their customers valued such things. I remember not long ago when people didn't care anything about gas mileage. But now it is important, so in this sense there is some progress.

But human nature is what it is - so much easier to cheat than to work at making something good. Hopefully the government steps in and punishes the offenders.

"Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

-- Benjamin Franklin

I believe it is from the fact that the first Pope was originally called 'Simon' and was renamed 'Peter' when he received his appointment ("on this rock (petrum) I will build my Church" Mt 16). So when the Pope is chosen his name is also changed, but strangely he gets to choose it.

Well it seems that they at least use it:

curl -I -L -A 'Mozilla' http://www.vatican.va/ | grep 'Server'

gives Server: Apache

The html source uses tons of functions from Lytebox, a CC 3.0 license. So it looks like they use it.

Seriously guys, don't rely on third parties. If something is important to you, make it yourself!

I thought all serious slashdotters used GNUS for RSS feeds. Works great and you can customize it.

Even better - how about for sports athletes and even every person of adult age goes to the doctor for a scan, and his skeleton is profiled and kept in a database for future use.

Imagine what we could do if we could 3d print organs.

An enormous difference, actually. I have a friend who works with prosthetics and the construction of the mold is often a large part of the cost in making things like joint replacements for hips. In some situations the mold is very costly, and it can only be done once - if it doesn't work they have to do the whole thing over. This is a huge leap forward.

I once had to fix a server some 6000 km away due to a corrupted disk. Doing pdisk and modifying fstab over ssh and then a reboot. You just check and recheck to make sure you did it right and just hope you get a ping a few minutes later.

Can't imagine how these guys feel. 45 min ping and it isn't like they could ask someone to go turn it off and on again.

Good luck to the guys working on this.

With C you have to teach a whole bunch of syntax structures that are in many ways completely orthogonal to computer programming. You have to teach operator precedence, code blocks, assignments and pointers which are not triavial. For a beginner it is best to give them less syntactic baggage and some them the concepts. Once they get the concepts down, you can show them how to express it any language.

I used to teach Java programming, and the best year I gad was when I took three weeks to teach them Scheme first, all the way up to object construction(basically a summary of SICP to chapter 3). Then we were able to go very quickly into Java with these concepts. The kids then got to see Java not as a black box but the principles that make it work.

In the old days they used to teach Latin before they taught English grammar for many of the same reasons. The investment in time and effort pays back large dividends in the future.

I suggest that you try teaching C to ninth graders, and see if they grasp right away such a concept as a pointer in an easy manner. A good teacher doesn't throw the kids into the deep water right away but lets them walk about in the shallow end for awhile.

If you need quick access to LISP libraries, check out Quicklisp . Well over 800 libraries available with just a (ql:quickload "library-name"). You can even do some quick syntactic sugar to do (import ....) and you can have what Python has and even more.

If are other libraries that you need but are unavailable, might I suggest getting involved

The problem with Lisp libraries is not so much their lack, but the fact that they are not readily available. Some say that it is so easy to roll your own that Lisp discourages looking for a library. Plus it is sometimes fun to do it yourself, especially if you love Lisp. But their are lots of implementations that have extensive libraries, just like emacs has tons of extensions, the only downside is that there is not too much standardization (like emacs extensions).

Actually your example won't even compile. Your kid will type that in and nothing will happen as you will get a syntax error.

The Scheme example has already defined a function that is understandable and immediately usable.

For kids I would most recommend the Racket IDE. It has a window like other programs and buttons and even has a few games. For the smart kids though, I would give them Emacs and show them how the editor is written in the same language that they are using (Emacs has SLIME as well as GEISER that integrates well with Racket or Guile), and they really take off with that. Sometimes the kids spend hours just exploring of the Emacs operating system and all the different modes (and games).

I have tried VIM, especially for a C language class, and it does work too. Vim is a very powerful editor for compiled languages. But for LISP/Scheme Emacs is definitely superior. In Emacs you can even go Evil and teach them both.