Knuth covers this definitively in Volume 2 of "The Art of Computer Programming". I think I first read it in 1979 so it certainly used to be covered in teaching, maybe that's all been lost in the later generations. Now get off my lawn.

The analogy still holds. Somebody has to justify the ways of god to men, just that Milton couldn't do it in UML.

-- ..., lest they quickly become little better than a monarchy. I think you've forgotten that this is talking about schools in England. Which is actually a little better than a monarchy as the Queen stays out of stuff like this.

Look back over some previous slashdot submissions on Lego. While most computerized toys are rubbish, Lego have done a great job in putting a programmable element to something that's already great (and you should already know if your kid is into that kind of thing).

Don't know why it's modded "Informative". The link posted has a lot about vision, and freedom but nothing about what functions the freedom box is meant to provide.

and when TFA says the answer isn't obvious - it kind of is. Cambridge was the home of the first computer lab, staffed with people like Maurice Wilkes and Roger Needham. That's exactly why I'd expect it to be the answer.

Microsoft have never really cared about getting calendar details right. Whenever a colonial (maybe should I say yank to really annoy them - even though I know they're not all yanks) sends a meeting request it arrives saying GMT as the timezone for London instead of BST. You would have thought that they could get the hang of daylight saying as they have it too. You actually have to confirm with the other end and say: you know that meeting that says 1:00 pm GMT is really 1:00pm BST or noon GMT (actually I normally translate to whatever zone they're in) e.g 8:00 am EDT.

Maybe that explains why NASA put in all of the US state borders on their map as homage to Mason and Dixon. Don't know why they also did it for Australia though. Assuming that that isn't actually the reason, why the hell would you draw a map like that? It looks really weird - unless it's just an American aesthetic?

The binomial model is common in textbooks because it's intuitively appealing, but if you only apply it to basic European (exercisable at expiry) options then there really are better ways of getting a closed form solution i.e. the Black-Scholes (or Bachelier-Thorp ....) formula. If you want half decent pricing methods for more general cases then you'll end up with Finite difference or Monte-Carlo methods depending on dimensionality, at which point you've already given up on a closed form solution. One of the reasons that TFA is so unintelligible is it's an academic treatment of half of the theory of a non-problem. (and as others have already pointed out - it has nothing to say about how the finance industry operates).

I thought TFA said that it had no whois data - but use seem to know it's run by someone called Viola. Maybe her surname's Walla.

After the "linux doesn't handle it story" a couple of weeks ago http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/02/14/1541244/Linux-Not-Quite-Ready-For-New-4K-Sector-Drives I wondered if the mis-alignment was what was causing my poor postgres performance on the WD Caviar Green. After quite a lot of effot moving things around I didn't actually see any noticeable difference. Now I'm left wondering whether the mis-alignment effect is dwarfed by the effort of reading 3.5K of a 4K block for every random 0.5K block write. The fact that the disk is lying to the driver is the big deal here. Does anybody know how to force the linux sd driver to use 4k blocks regardless of the what the disk tells it about blocksize?