When I talk about "they" I am not talking about a corporation, but Mr. and Mrs. Green who own Hobby Lobby.

But Mr and Mrs Green are not the ones paying for the employees' health care. Rather, those checks are from the corporation.

People are acting like Hobby Lobby employees are somehow harmed by not having their employer pay for something they never paid for in the first place.

Maybe you don't understand how employer health care works. The reason an employer provides health care is because an employee works for them. So, in a very real way, the value of the health care has already been earned by the employee. Thus, it's not Mr and Mrs Green paying for the health care at all is it? It's the employees who pay for it, with their labor (and also direct deductions from their paychecks). Employer health care is not charity.

Hobby Lobby is this era's version of Plessy v Ferguson. In a relatively short time, it will be looked back upon with embarrassment.

Oh wait, it gets better. The esteemed Dr Cohen also stated that you could not die from exposure to radiation.

I'm pretty sure you'll agree that 1410 lbs of plutonium is probably not safe to keep under your bed.

You will notice that while Dr Cohen offered to consume as much plutonium as you would caffeine, he never actually did so.

The annals of the history of science are littered with cranks.

Dr Cohen also said that he believed uranium to be a renewable resource. Unless he's figured out a way to grow uranium, I'm sure you'll agree there is a finite amount of the substance. Dr Cohen did not believe that the amount of uranium on Earth was finite.

Crackpot.

Where else can you drain the ocean, trap whales in lead cages, load them into lead minecarts, and send them careening down the steep, steep slope to hell as a kinetic anti-demon weapon?

You've clearly never used DMT.

Clean, safe and too cheap to meter.

Anybody who tries to use a misplaced 640 kilograms of plutonium to spread FUD about 1950's Energy Source of Future is just a damn liar.

But you have to admit, Japan has a pretty remarkable record with nukes. They must have it in their blood. At least the ones whose grandparents lived in Nagasaki.

Regarding the lost 1410 lbs of the deadliest substance on Earth, I'm pretty sure it has something to do with that giant lizard marching toward Tokyo (and no, I'm not referring to Shinzo Abe's economic policy).

I absolutely agree with you. I have some doubt though that SICP needs to be a first course.

Embedded, ROMs, low level OS components... is obviously the old paradigm. Most of an OS or VM though I'd say is going to be high level library manipulation. As for writing a library, I think it depends on the library. Most libraries today are highly dependent on other libraries.

Why don't you boycott the Supreme Court?

I don't think "boycott" means what you think it does.

It's not their faith telling them they are abortifacients, It is the US Government Department of Health and Human Services. HHS says the 2 IUDs in question and the morning/week after pills in question keep a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. Their faith says that life begins at conception, so being force to pay for something that keeps that life from implanting in the uterus is a violation of their religious belief.

So basically, you're just saying what I'm saying, "It's their faith that tells them these are abortifacients."

Further, when you talk about the "they" in "their religious beliefs", you are not talking about individuals, but a corporation. Now, we can argue whether or not corporations are people, my friend, but I'm pretty sure you will agree that "Inc" does not have religious beliefs.

As you can clearly see from the National Review article (and the National Review is the mothership for anti-abortion types), this is NOT about abortifacients, but about absolutely anything that someone can say violates their religious beliefs. And if you recall your history, you will note that at one time people found religious justification for owning slaves, refusing to serve blacks, gays, Catholics and Jews.

That's why Hobby Lobby is this era's Plessy v Ferguson. It will go down as one of those decisions about which people will someday say, "That wrong-headed case was decided during the bad old days". And not because of anything having to do with abortion.

I'm sure there were people back during Plessy, that made rational-sounding arguments just like yours for why segregating the races was God's will.

Scheme was developed from LISP to prove the possibility of constructing a language from the ground up using a Meta-circular evaluator. That was important for SICP because it meant that every student knew how to create a language using arbitrary primitives, a DSL. There is no way in an 1 year introductory Python class the students would be anywhere near ready to implement a Python with different primitives. You can argue that the entire LISP philosophy is the wrong approach to solving complex problems, and I think history has perhaps show that, but arguing it was just stupid is a bit much.

As for going 18 levels deep that probably should be broken out about every 5 levels into smaller simpler functions.

As for arrays:

    (array dimensions element0 ...) -> array
    (array '(2 3) 'a 'b 'c 'd 'e 'f) -> {Array 2 3}
That doesn't seem that hard.

as a functional language, new students must first learn to think along a different paradigm, one opposed to how they had been thinking their whole life, before they can begin to comprehend the basic concepts they're supposed to be learning

Most students can handle Excel, a functional language. I think breaking them of their bad habits is a good thing for an intro course. It puts most of the students on the same level regardless of background. In a week they won't get there, in a year certainly.

Mostly if I were teaching an intro course today I'd probably go with Python. But I don't think it is nearly as clear as you do. Haskell for example (which keeps most of the essence of LISP with giving them more modern concepts) would be a consideration.

The people who designed the SICP curriculum felt it wasn't teaching the right paradigms. SICP was built around a world where a programmer wrote small programs and tied them together. An individual programmer could really understand an entire production program. Today's programming world involves programmers using massive and complex specialized libraries with far more large group projects. SICP/Scheme didn't train people for that sort of environment. They needed to switch from "what data-structure would best accomplish this goal" to "which library would best accomplish this goal" and Scheme encourages much the opposite.

SICP is probably still the best programming concepts book ever written but those concepts are less important than they used to be.

Python doesn't really support functional programming. A good multi-paradigm educational language which also has a great textbook is Oz.

What are you talking about? Interpreted languages let you reuse data structures for performance. What he did was a performance hack. If anything in languages where getting performance is more difficult we'd expect more, more complex and more subtle bugs like the SSL one.

I hope Bill Gates is planning to include Kinect technology in a diaphragm.

I'm not going to read TFA, but in my mind, that's totally what's going to happen. I'm boggled by the possibilities.

Another one is "Open Carry".

Something tells me these courageous members of a well-regulated militia aren't getting any.

http://www.westernjournalism.c...

http://www.cavemancircus.com/w...

http://localtvwtvr.files.wordp...

It's about more than just "abortifacients". http://www.nationalreview.com/... Except, the four methods Hobby Lobby objected to are not "abortifacients". http://www.newrepublic.com/art... But I guess, if their faith tells them they're abortifacients, then abortifacients they shall be. Isn't that the whole point of the decision of the five (male) Supreme Court justices? And we already have cases being brought to use the Hobby Lobby precedent to allow all sorts of civil rights violations, nullification of laws, and even special exemption from taxation based on religious faith. It's going to be a few interesting years until Hobby Lobby is overturned, which it almost certainly will be, Hobby Lobby is the 21st century's Plessy v. Ferguson. But that's the whole point, right?