This is exactly why Python is so popular as a teaching language these days - it also lets you skip most of the boilerplate for the initial exercises, and focus on the core concepts like conceptual execution, the notion of variables and values, conditionals and loops etc. It's a true OO ("everything is an object") language, but you won't ever see a class or a method call in hello world type code.

Oh, and it has a built-in turtle graphics package. I don't think a better tool to explain things such as loops and recursion has ever been devised.

It also randomly renames things that have well-established terms already. E.g. "abstract" methods - all languages that have them, have agreed on the meaning of it for the past 30 years or so. But VB calls them "MustOverride". And "abstract" on classes is "MustInherit". And those labels don't even make much sense, because, taken literally, they make claims that are plainly not true (you don't have to inherit from an abstract class - you just can't instantiate its instances; and even if you do inherit, you don't have to override any abstract methods - it's just that your class is also abstract if you don't).

There are over a hundred different altcoins by now. What makes this one so different that it's Slashdot-front-page worthy?

...Someone from the back row shouts out "Because our AdSense profile has determined you were visiting websites about cigarettes recently, your health insurance premium has gone up by 5% and you will probably die slightly sooner. Remember, [i]f you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place!"

Is it cynicism if you're just using a Markov chain to predict what other Slashdotters will say?

(Although obviously this is auto insurance, so I'm sure someone can translate the threat appropriately.)

It will be just an other obscure mobile OS - But If Samsung actually start to manufacture Tizen devices over Android. They will loose the market just like NOKIA did a few years before.

Ahem.

There's a little unspoken benefit about what a true, affordable, universal-coverage broadband system could provide for: drones. Envision drones that can provide high quality real-time streaming (commands to the drone, imagery back) without requiring line of sight or effective cellular service.

Individuals and companies could get the sort of drone communication that today only exists for militaries. Buoyant drones (hydrogen, helium) could stay aloft for long periods and go anywhere. Conceivably a hydrogen-powered drone could stay aloft until its electronics failed, via condensing atmospheric moisture via a hygroscopic material and electrolysing it to replace the slow rate of leakage (using solar power). So picture a world where, say, anyone could buy a mass-produced mini spy drone and send anywhere, even a war zone with no infrastructure, and have it fly at a height where it would be almost impossible to spot. It would in most cases cost significantly more to take down than it costs to build (barring "drone killer" drones, but then you get to needing to maintain a large distributed inventory of them and a sensitive nationwide detection system that works at all altitudes, and you're just inviting people to come up with countermeasures). It would make it increasingly difficult to lie about human rights abuses, war crimes, armed incursions, etc.

I once looked into what it would take to make such a drone previously but quickly realized that the bandwidth costs alone via today's satellite internet services would get pretty astronomical quite fast, turning a "cheap drone" into a prohibitively expensive one. But this could change the picture. If satellite internet is cheap and widespread, not only will your bandwidth be cheap, but it also means that your connectivity hardware will also be widespread and cheap.

On the home front, one of the big concerns by regulatory bodies for all of these drone-based services companies are eager to launch is of course loss of connectivity - which is one reason why, for example, the FAA has been resisting them in the US. But if satellite service to a drone is much less likely to suffer from the reception irregularty that plagues cell phone towers. And you always have cell phone connectivity as a backup. You're greatly improving the overall reliability of your drone communications, which should make it easier to start getting commercial drone services approved by regulators.

And then there's the new HP Stream netbooks (they don't call it them, but a 11" notebook for $200 is a netbook, IMO).

It doesn't explain admin roles (where there are a lot), and I don't think that low-level HR jobs are all that cushy, either, or pay well compared to developers, especially a few years in when you get a couple of raises and associated cash bonuses.

FWIW, the (immigrant) women who are devs or dev managers do pretty well for themselves - I'm talking about senior positions here, the ones where combined base pay and bonuses would typically go $200k and above.

Even in modern countries there are holes. I live in Iceland and we have one of the best rates of broadband connectivity and fiber deployment in the world. But my land is in a sparsely populated valley so it hasn't paid off to run a line out there, most people just use their cell phones for a net connection. If satellite could beat that (and wouldn't be too blocked by mountains), even in highly connected countries there's a real potential market here.

Heck, there's a lot of people who would get it if the price and stats were right even if they had ground-based broadband. Everyone here has bandwidth caps on international net traffic, only domestic is unlimited. So people who want to do a lot of downloads of foreign content might well choose that instead of or inaddition to regular broadband.

If technology had jumped directly from the 1979 Impala to the 2014 Honda Accord, yes, that would have been really f*ing amazing and a huge technological innovation, and the company that did it worthy of every bit of praise thrown at it for doing so.

Yeah, I had written a section about this but must have messed up my tags and Slashdot ate it.. Delta clipper highest achieved altitude: 1 kilometer. Falcon 9 first stage alone highest achieved altitude: 130km. Delta clipper furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300 meters. Falcon 9 first stage alone, furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300km. Delta clipper mass ratio, 2,5. Falcon 9 first stage alone, mass ratio 20 (and the boosters on the Falcon Heavy have a mass ratio of 30). And on and on and on. Not to mention that they're built utterly differently.

Aww, Slashdot ate my whole paragraph comparing Falcon 9 to the Delta Clipper, that was the best one.... must have messed up my tagging :(

Your daughter will be in confrontation with authorities if, say, her house gets SWATed on a false charge (because an unreliable informant pointed at it), or simply because they got the wrong address or the wrong door. She won't get a chance to say "yes sir, please and thank you", because she won't be asked - the first thing she'll know is when her door is blown off the hinges with a shotgun and a flashbang comes in. Maybe it lands into her baby's crib, too. Maybe she gets a limb or two broken when they put her face down into the floow. Best case, they will only shoot the dogs and mess up the room with the entrance before they figure out something's wrong and leave (with no apologies and no compensation for damages).

Or perhaps she'll be driving around with a couple thousand dollars in cash, that she won in a lottery, and gets stopped by cops because they'll claim she's speeding (but really because she's cute). And when they see the money they will claim that such a large amount in cash is suspicious, and arrest it as proceeds from drug sales, because they get to pocket a good part of it for their PD (i.e. to buy more toys like MRAPs and .50 BMG sniper rifles for themselves).

If she is black, it might get even more interesting. For example, during a routine traffic stop (for which she needn't do anything wrong, they might just be randomly pulling people over) an officer will ask her for ID, and she'll reach for her pocket because that's where the wallet is... and get shot point blank because the officer thought she's reaching for the gun. Because that's what he thinks of first when he sees a black person reach for their waist.

Or maybe she'll get arrested on an outright false charge just because she happens to come across a cop who "just hates niggers, that is all".

FYI, all of the above is not a figment of my imagination. It's all real stories that happened right here in USA with different people. The chances of something like that affecting your daughter are still orders of magnitude higher than the chances of being killed by a terrorist. So rather promoting more surveillance state, you might want to talk to your representative in Congress about police militarization first.

You might want to brush up on your history. Up until 200 years ago or so, there wasn't even such a nationality as "French" or "Spanish". There were Bretons, Catalans etc. And most European states up until then were united not by shared ethnicity, and in many cases not even by shared culture or religion, but by allegiance to the same monarch. It wasn't until the advent of what we now call Romantic nationalism at the end of the 18th century, that ethnicity really began to matter in national politics in a big way.

In fact, the current relatively uniform ethnic composition of European states didn't crystallize until a lot of borders were redrawn after WW1 (e.g. treaty of Trianon), and massive population transfers in the aftermath of WW2. So the current state of affairs is literally 70 years old.

Of course, the notion that just because your ancestor ten generations removed has lived in a political entity with roughly similar borders and/or name two centuries ago, you get some special entitlement in the current political entity in its place, is absurd on its face anyway.

Internet satellite thingy - almost identical to Teledesic

Teledesic: Launched on Pegasus rockets which cost your firstborn child. SpaceX: Launched on Falcon rockets which are cheaper than the Russians and Chinese even without reuse. Teledescic: 90s computer and communications tech (this was the era where playing the original Doom game took a high end computer and nerds envied those with ISDN connections). SpaceX: 10 iterations of Moore's Law later. Teledescic: Communcation sats have to be large objects with heavy hydrazine thrusters for stationkeeping. SpaceX: Much smaller satellites available (all the way down to cubesats), with a wide variety of ion thrusters for stationkeeping available.

Yeah, totally the same situation.

Hyperloop - first theorised by Robert Goddard nearly a century ago and a staple of SF for decades

Goddard and sci-fi: vaccuum tube. Hyperloop: tube full of thin air. Goddard and sci-fi: maglev. Hyperloop: ground-effect aerofoils. Compressor on each craft. Goddard and sci-fi: massive trains holding huge numbers of passengers. Hyperloop: small computer-timed trains to spread out the load on the track and thus reduce construction costs. Goddard and sci-fi: Trains implausibly deep underground. Hyperloop: built like a monorail. Goddard and sci-fi: tubes take the shortest route to their destination. Hyperloop: Trains go primarily over already-built and permitted infrastructure to reduce right of way and environmental costs / challenges.

Yeah, totally the same situation.

Falcon 9 - It can land vertically, like errr, the lunar module or the Delta Clipper

Tesla - Okay, they're quite nice but electric cars aren't exactly a new idea

Aww, you didn't give me an example to compare it to! Let's just go with the EV-1, since that was probably the most modern commercially-produced EV before Tesla EV-1, range 60 miles (older version) to 100 miles (newer version). Tesla Roadster, range 230 miles, and Model S, up to 300. EV-1, 0-60=8 seconds. Tesla Roadster and Model S Performance, 4 seconds. EV-1 production: about 1100. Tesla: produces that many cars in *1 1/2 weeks*. EV-1: Loved by owners but panned by critics. Tesla Model S: not only loved by owners but has been getting some of the highest ratings for any kind of car period.

Your "analogies" are akin to saying "So what if he won the Indy 500 - I raced my go-cart down the street the other day and beat a soap-box racer!"