"But it also suggests an incursion of anti-science, anti-vaccine thinking in one of the smartest regions on Earth."

ooor, it suggests that there are more intelligent people in one of the smartest regions on Earth, who have actually thought through the consequences of their decision. _maybe_ they see the harm caused by vaccinations. _maybe_ these people have thought, "gosh, y'know, giving my young child a massive simultaneous hit of diseases for their body to fight all at once isn't such a good idea, given that healthy humans never *ever* get more than one disease at a time because once activated the immune system goes into hyper-drive".

_maybe_ these people have had the thought, "y'know, humanity has survived up until this point, by fighting off disease and as a result each individual develops its own strong and healthy immune system, and the weaker ones don't survive. _maybe_ i am doing my child - and humanity - a favour by not following the herd".

you think it's _good_ to carry out mass-vaccination of a species?? how did you get so completely and utterly brainwashed that you have to claim it's "anti-science"?? f***k you you completely insane person - and stay the hell away from my family.

COOL!! I love that idea! Too bad you posted as AC, I'd be PMing you to ask where I can send a pizza to for that one!

One Saturday morning, I had to rush to the convenience store near the house because we learned we were out of milk for the baby. There was some reason or another it was a rush, I don't quite remember why it couldn't wait. All I know is that I was buying milk for a baby. This is one of those things which goes in the list of "It doesn't get any more pure than that" or "Only a jackass would keep a person from buying milk for their baby", etc...

Well I got there and apparently it was the last 15 minutes before cut-off for lottery tickets for the week. It took precisely 15 minutes to reach the front of the line. Do you know why? Because the three people in front of me had stacks of lottery tickets forms they had spent considerable time (dozens of hours) filling in that all had to be manually fed to the machine before the cut-off because these people actually believed that the actual numbers they chose mattered. It wasn't good enough to just say "Give me 400 quick pick tickets", they had to all be custom.

So, in the end, my son had to wait an extra 15 minutes to get his milk because these idiots are still breathing air ... which I can only imagine reaches brain cells in suboptimal quantities.

I can honestly say, I've never seen anyone other than fixed-income granny buy a single lottery ticket. It seems far more common that tickets are purchased in wallets, stacks or boxes. It's a tax designed specifically to try and convince people to burn their money on government sponsored gambling instead of online or casino gambling. Either way, the government is 100% sure you'll lose and they'll win and the lottery at least lets them win a greater percentage than if they had to share with the casino.

This is why it's called "The volunteer stupid tax". It's a tax people pay for being stupid and are simply so stupid they choose to pay it voluntarily.

I simply have no patience for those people

$2 is a used paperback book
$2 is a used college text that has a new version
$2 is a bus ticket
$2 is a Egg McMuffin for breakfast.
$2 is a gallon of gas to visit a friend
$2 is half way to something that's 4 bucks

I can go on for ages. I can spend $2 tens of thousands of times a year. If you want to spend $2 on a gambling receipt, you're welcome to do so. You have all my blessings. But the instant you think that the crumby little piece of paper gives you hope for something greater, I recommend you spend $2 on a used bible instead, I have never found anything other than a few interesting old stories in it, but I hear there are billions of suckers out there who have found hope in those things. The odds are far better in your favor there.

Wilmore's show is still pretty rough after only a few episodes.
Let's see how it will turn out during its second season when they've had time to work out the kinks.

Bassem Youssef would be an awesome choice. since he's already running the same format in Egypt and his recent visit to the US version more than proved that he's up to the task. I'm just not sure if he'd accept the offer.

On Windows Azure, OpenStack, Citrix and even the ever-lame VMware,there are extensive orchestration tools. Write your script once and next time you need a server, click deploy.

how is 96boards different from a pc? or how is the situation that 96boards presents different from a pc? apologies, because the question, in its brevity (but mainly through the use of the word "it"), is very unclear.

working on it. i'm creating products on either side of the standard to get it started, and will continue to do so for at least a decade until the standards reach critical mass.

i'm the author of the EOMA standards, including EOMA68, so i have spent something like two years developing and refining hardware standards that will not confuse end-users. http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope...

the 1.0 (i.e. final and absolute unchangeable) version of the 96boards "consumer" standard from 96boards will be going on the list of alternative standards, as, sadly, another example of a standard that will result in end-user confusion, annoyance, product returns and, ultimately, failure.

the reason is incredibly simple: an end-user standard MUST NOT have optional interfaces. i do not understand why people developing standards do not understand this. page 7 of the 27 page v1.0 specification states, clearly, "1 OR 2 MIPI CSI-2 ports MAY be provided on the expansion bus interface" and "From 1-2 lanes MAY be implemented on the CSI1 port interface". now whilst the latter is absolutely fine (because negotiation takes place at the hardware-level, so either host or client will correctly negotiate 1 or 2 lanes), the former most definitely is NOT.

let's think it through. here's a simple scenario. an end-user buys a 2-lane box, and a lot of expensive camera equipment. they then find that the box is too slow, and need to upgrade. so they go out and buy another box, and, BY MISTAKE, when they get it home, they discover that they only bought a 1-lane box. as there is NOTHING WRONG with it, they may NOT return it as faulty under warranty.

additional confusion results from page 8, over the options that the 3rd USB port MAY be a USB-OTG port. again, people will buy a system and a set of peripherals, relying on the USB-OTG capabilities... and then upgrade at a later date and make the mistake of not knowing what the hell is going on until it's too late. they investigate further and find "whoops, i bought the wrong system: this one doesn't have USB-OTG power damnit".

DC power requirements, page 8: again, more confusion when upgrading.

2nd (optional) UART, page 9: more confusion results.

a summary is given on page 12, where the moment you see the word "optional", count them. that becomes a permutation of the number of possible things that an end-user has to check when first selecting and then double-checking on upgrading the device. i count (if you include the USB confusion and the power options) at least *SEVEN* possible "options", giving... someone else can do the math here, it's what... over a hundred different permutations at least.

and then, when you get to the end of page 12 only then do you discover that the expansion board connections may be used as GPIO!

*sigh* i have to say that this really does not look like a very well-thought-out standard, at all.

In a world where most programmers don't have a clue why they chose a list vs. an array vs. a tree for anything, this is actually an excellent question to test students with.

This is obviously not an optimal solution to the problem it solves, but it is in fact a fairly compact example that can be used to test whether a student understands recursion and can follow code.

The question isn't whether there is bad code on the exam. This was a great question.

The question is, is there also a question relating to excessive or unbound recursion and what will happen if the number is too big.

What about Big-O notation and algorithmic complexity.

I had to implement a compiler and virtual machine last week because I couldn't find anyone else to do it that was available. This is because not enough people understand topics like recursion.

The teacher who posted the article made it very clear that his competence is limited and he himself is quite slow witted by stating the he found recursion hard to understand at first. Why is this even on Slashdot?

the important question is did the procedure solve the intestinal problem?

note: the use of less-than and greater-than within what i have written above has been mangled by slashdot, resulting in it being unintelligable at a key strategic point. that point is when script language is mentioned. it's supposed to read less-than script language equals python greater-than and less-than script language equals javascript.

when i started the pyjamas-desktop project i assumed that the "open-ness" that is written into the mozilla foundation charter would be an inviolate quantity that they would adhere to. taking this on faith i found the python-hulahop bindings of the OLPC project to be perfect to allow HTML5 DOM to be entirely (even exclusively) manipulated *python-side* instead of using javascript.

for anyone not familiar with the difference between pyxpcomext and python-hulahop, pyxpcomext was a project funded in 2000 by the mozilla foundation to *literally* embed python - making it a peer language of javascript - *within* a firefox browser. you downloaded a whopping 10mbyte extension for either linux or windows and you could do *not* just script language equals javascript and it would work, *including* accessing the *FULL* and complete DOM manipulation functions that we normally expect to have from javascript (exclusively, as it turns out in most peoples' mindsets).

python-hulahop on the other hand is (or was) a pygtk widget which allowed one to create a GTK window that happened to have a Gecko (HTML5/DOM) engine running in it, which *happened* also, amazingly, to provide one with the full set of DOM manipulation functions, starting from a python function GetDOMDocument() and going from there to the thousands of functions one normally expects to be the exclusive monopolistic domain of javascript.

the irony is that the python-hulahop project was only created so that the OLPC team could create their own embedded browser (in python), and they went to the trouble of using just a tiny fraction of the available functionality to implement the "Go" button, "Back" button, history and so on, all using the python bindings to the internal XPCOM interface that allows direct access to the full functionality of the Gecko Engine.

one other thing is needed to be explained before we can get on to what the problem is: XPCOM was "inspired" by Microsoft COM, and it *could* have been absolutely brilliant. COM is... deeply awe-inspiringly powerful, it is that flexible and ubiquitous. you may have heard me mention in the past that COM is what allows binary Active-X components compiled *TWO DECADES* ago to still be useful and useable on modern Windows (and Wine) systems today, even though in some cases the company that created them will have gone out of business.

technically the problem with XPCOM is that they forgot to implement co-classes, meaning that the only choice available to them is to *remove* quotes broken quotes functions and to constantly upgrade upgrade upgrade. this problem is at the heart of every single complaint for the past *TEN YEARS* by 3rd party developers using the Gecko Engine in java or c++ applications. they're SICK of having to recompile their applications to suit the mozilla foundation's schedule, particularly as it is such a mammoth task and may need to be done frequently (especially due to a security fix).

so with that as background we start to get some hints as to inherent problems that have been stressing out the developers for some considerable time. ...so what did they do about it? well, they responded to the "threat" of webkit (the engine behind chrome) by announcing a "speed, speed, speed" pathological binge - this was around 2010 or 2011. the ABSOLUTE top priority became not to be "open" - even to the extent of violating the spirit *and* the letter of the mozilla foundation charter - but to be "The Best". "The Fastest".

one of the first things that were removed was a single line from a header file - a "friend class" declaration. this one tiny change was utterly profound: it was a key absolutely critical change that prevented and prohibited the python-hulahop source code from accessing the XPCOM infrastructure. without that "friend class" declaration, there was absolutely no way that the GNU/Linux distros could take the standard gecko / xulrunner source code and have hulahop get that key strategic pointer to the Gecko Engine's top level XPCOM object.

when i pointed out how severe the consequences of this ill-considered unilateral decision were to the top people at the mozilla foundation, i was told "it's not a priority. speed is our priority".

when i pointed out that this violated the mozilla foundation charter i did not receive a response.

the second problem was that a couple of the functions (XMLHTTPRequest was one of them) had optional parameters that were only available via a hack of accessing the *javascript* parameter stack. when calling the exact same function from python, c++ or java, obviously this javascript-parameter stack would be empty.

basically i was running into the limitations of XPCOM not having co-classes, but from a different angle. the concept of co-classes are what gives e.g. c++ its "optional parameters" or its ability to have entirely different parameters for any given function, and the compiler works out which is the best one to use: co-classes is a *runtime* implementation of that, and it's utterly cool as it allows one to provide binary backwards-compatibility (you simply keep the old functions as-is and just add new ones which implement new functionality), a means to implement optional parameters (you provide functions with 3, 4, 5 and so on parameters) and more besides.

so i created a patch which extended the XMLHTTPRequest function out to 5 parameters (allowing me and anyone else to call it from c++ or java). the patch was *not accepted*. instead, some blithering idiot created an amazing idea of modifying the functions to take an "optional number of parameters" parameter. imagine having to write c++ code where one of the parameters told the compiler how many parameters the function had, and you start to get an inkling of quite how spectacularly stupid this idea of theirs really was.

again, when i raised quite how strategically vital this area was, and how important it was that this be discussed (and this incredibly dumb idea not allowed), i got nowhere.

the patch went in - and it entirely destroyed the ability of pyxpcom to correctly call those functions *AT ALL*. XMLHTTPRequest - an absolutely *critical* function to the operation of about 80% of pyjamas-desktop applications - had just been utterly destroyed by some dick being allowed to make arbitrary decisions with blatant disregard for other projects that critically depend on Mozilla Foundation funded technology.

so now, if you want pyjamas-desktop with a gecko (xulrunner) engine, you are forced to use versions 1.9.11.1 (the last known good variant from a stable distribution), or xulrunner 7.0 (which briefly made its way into debian/testing for a short period of time) and is - was - only really available in binary precompiled form from activestate.com in their komodo editor.

in 2011 i made a brief effort to compile up xulrunner 9.0 in the hopes of saving python-hulahop - making it a dependency - but the thought of becoming both an upstream and downstream maintainer of such a vast amount of code *UNFUNDED* was just too much.

so the summary is: congratulations to the mozilla foundation for violating your charter - for closing your doors to developers who were actually more interested in expanding the reach of your source code than you are. may you pay for following your chosen path by learning painfully for your closed-minded thinking.

has anyone else noticed that typos have become much more prevalent in slashdot articles in the past year, and that they are less-often corrected? sited, it's, and many more.