Well, it's more complicated than that. I favor independence for The Republic of China as the government of Taiwan, perhaps with a more accurately descriptive name. But, there are two Chinas. The Republic of China, which controls Taiwan, and the Peoples Republic of China, which controls the remainder of China, both claim sovereignty over the mainland and Taiwan. The "own government" of Taiwan, that is, the Republic of China, describes Taiwan as a province of China. There is no government that describes itself as the government of an independent Taiwan. It appears that many citizens of The Republic of China now wish to be a permanently independent nation on Taiwan, rather than taking control of mainland China. That mission was instituted by the Kuomintang party when it lost the civil war on the mainland and took control of Taiwan from the Japanese. The Republic of China now chooses to follow an ambiguous path, which may lead eventually to formally declared independence, but the government has not established such a policy. The Republic of China refers to the areas under its actual control as the free area of the Republic of China, and does not acknowledge that this free area constitutes its entire territory.

New York City removed its last public payphone on Monday.

Look at the Snopes fact check.

Yes, the preview, which in my interface is mandatory, allows me to edit before posting and I always do that. When I miss an error in the preview, I cannot find a way to fix it after posting.

Ooops. I accidentally included my response in the quote. Only the first partial sentence is a quote from the previous post. I can't find a way to edit.

I was involved in some discussion of this idea a couple of decades ago. I published an article in Communications of the ACM, wrote two Internet Drafts, and presented the idea at a "Future of the Internet" conference. Several other people had thought about the idea but as far as I know shared only in private communication.

At least one of the founders of Internet had the same opinion when DNS was first deployed. But it was deployed under time pressure and two-part alternatives were not considered seriously.

I apologize for not providing links and better information. I am rather ill, and thought I should make some contact with available energy.

If anyone wishes to pursue the idea, I will dig up as much as I can for you from the old history. I can't find a way to send private messages within Slashdot. You can find my email through my personal URL in the signature (footer of the page).

Thank you, Prof. bradley13.

I am now a retired Professor, having spent 35 years teaching. The practice of presenting lectures and readings to students, then isolating them for a limited time while provoking them with questions to which they write answers, has never been shown to be a good method of teaching nor of evaluating the results of teaching for all remembering very simple information. I am convinced that we stick to this method through thoughtless inertia rather than for any good pedagogical reasons.

There is some evidence that a short quiz on simple factual material is a good teaching device when followed immediately by confirmation of correct and incorrect answers. I have never seen evidence that the score on such a quiz is important, except that the must be few enough incorrect answers that the student can absorb the corrections.

During my active career, I experimented with project-driven courses, where the project had different levels which led to different grades stated in advance. I encouraged as much collaboration as students wished, but required each student to explain her/his work to me in a final interview.

I did not get very far with this alternate plan as an individual teacher, and there might be very different ideas that did not occur to me. But I think the teaching profession should definitely be exploring alternatives to lecture-read-test rather than putting all energy into enforcing strict rules in the exams.

(It's presented as a joke, but ...) Windows 93.

I count at least 3 times that "automatic programming," where a computer translates a "description" into actual code, was solved:

1. 1. Programming with wires on a patchboard was automated by machine language.
2. 2. Programming in machine language, including putting in the binary codes but worse, having to assign addresses to particular pieces of data, was automated by assembly language.
3. 3. Programming in assembly language, in particular the translation of ideas such as mathematical formulae into sequences of individual load, operate, and store operations, was automated by FORTRAN and COBOL and similar "higher level" languages.

After these 3, the changes don't form such clear discrete steps, but ALGOL, APL, LISP, SNOBOL, PASCAL, C, Python and so on change the form in which we "describe" what we want in various ways, that seem to be handier at least for some people working on some problems.

It is highly likely that new ways of describing programs will also become new ways of programming, rather than eliminating programming. "Programming" of some things becomes easier for a wider group of people, and a wider range of problems becomes accessible to experts. But whatever has to be done to describe problems and their algorithmic solutions becomes a new sort of "programming," and this is unlikely to end in any vaguely foreseeable way.

Before computers, there were amusing stories about the problem of expressing wishes to fairies and genies. One of my favorites is Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit. These stories reveal that expressing correctly, or "describing," what one wants is inherently tricky, and not solved entirely by the power of the agent carrying out our wishes.

On my Lenovo T420 keyboard, the one on which I am typing this comment, there is a key marked "Enter" on the far right just above the "Shift" key. There is no key marked "Return." Mr. Gruber probably needs to distinguish between keys on a keyboard, which are usually all distinguishable by the keyboard driver, and the characters or functions to which they are translated, usually under software control. The Wikipedia article on ASCII code supports the crossword clue in note h at the bottom: "The Carriage Return character can also be entered by pressing the Enter or Return key on most systems."

The definitive joke was already told decades ago, in the form of two book titles:

1. Tom Swift and His Electric Aeroplane
2. Tom Swift and His Thousand Mile Extension Cord.

The action link for contacting my senator is broken. It gets a Wayback machine version, but I'm not confident using the contact buttons in that. The main eff.org page is up. I'll keep poking, but if somebody finds the reason and or workaround please post.

This site describes DIY antennas, and appears to be solid and objective. I ordered the kit, and it seemed to be good, but I got lazy and bought a commercial version with 3 bowties, and it worked well sitting in a window. The house was 20-25 miles from downtown Chicago, with flat ground in between, so it was not a challenging location.

TV Fool has good data on the proximity and direction of stations. Their compass heading worked perfectly for me in Chicago suburbs, but again, not a challenging location.

I wanted to score this one up, since it contains actual interesting and relevant information which the poster took the trouble to gather and share. But I can't find the control for giving it a higher score.