What you are ignoring is that identical twins don't just share single genes, they share identical arrangements of every gene. They also share most epigenetic markers. There isn't a single gene that is for, say, preferring a particular brand of cigarettes. But with a large enough number of identical genes you get things like "preferring the shape of a circle surrounded by grene" and "lack of concern over a bitter taste", etc. until you do get a large number of "unexpected correlations above chance". This doesn't mean they have a gene for preferring Taryton cigaretts.

I've seen it both ways in IBM documentation. It is the numeral one, but I think sometimes they were thinking in Roman Numerals, and other times in Arabic.

Yes. So MAYBE it's reasonable. But since it's selected for promotion by the NSA it's also reasonable to look for secondary effects. Remember, they not only acted to strengthen net encryption in a way that nobody understood for a decade, they also acted to weaken it in a way that nobody understood for a decade.

If you can't tell one hand from the other, why shouldn't you assume that it's the treacherous one? Vile acts can be MUCH more destructive than virtuous act can be constructive.

Sorry, but PL/1 was a decent language with atrocious subsets at rediculous prices. The compiler was also large and slow. And I had some problems with it's "intelligent type conversion"s. But you've got to remember what other languages were around at the time. It hadn't learned Object Oriented programming. Etc. But it made safe use of pointers rather easy. I wrote my first Red-Black tree in PL/1 and it was a lot easier both to do and to understand than the one I did later in C.

OTOH, I must admit that I was coming to it from Fortran and never did pick up the Cobol parts of it, except for picture type variables, which I occasionally found useful. (Doing dynamic format statements in Fortran IV was quite difficult.)

Except that one wonders *why* are they funding it. How will it make our communications less secure?

Off hand the only thing that comes to mind is that there would be fewer components of the browser that the NSA needed to compromise if all the languages used the same interpreter. Perhaps that's all there is. It's even possible that they didn't fund the project with a malign intent. That, however, is not the way I'd bet given their "improvements" of encryption methods.

This depends entirely on their purpose. If the purpose is to have an arbitrary reason to harass people it works fine.

No. But a stamp series featuring KISS would be interesting. I doubt, however, that I'd pay extra for it.

Strict constructionists (in the US) know that the Constitution promises that each state will have a republican form of government, not a democracy. It sure doesn't promise that everyone will be allowed to vote, as most of the founding fathers believed that only men (i.e., not women) who owned property should be allowed to vote, and some of them wanted the restrictions to be tighter than that. (I'm not sure what their stance was on free Negroes that owned property. I've never encountered any direct quotation. Many of them, however, didn't believe that Indians should be allowed to vote.)

As customization reaches lower and lower levels, it becomes increasingly difficult to meaningfully compromise it. Probably the only way to meaningfully compromise an FPGA is to autodetect an internet connectin, and stream out to it everything you receive, possibly only on receiving a particular activation signal. That would be reasonably easy to detect, and even THAT compromise wouldn't be easy, but FPGAs don't have any memory capacity, so they can't accumulate and wait to be polled.

Well, if they WERE to advertise it that way, many of my objections would vanish. Of course, I still wouldn't buy what they were selling...

That, in more restrained language, was my initial response. I.e., "It couldn't happen to a more deserving company.".

I hope Sony loses, though I'm not really interrested in whether the guy wins.

OTOH, there have been (above) arguments that seem to argue that he should win as a point of law, as well as a point of justice. (And unusual synchrony.)

While you are correct, the comment is about students. If you don't learn to program without a garbage collector, you haven't really learned to program. I'd go further and insist that you need a good foundation in an assembly language. MIX is good enough, you don't need anything fancy. You just need to learn how things work at the basic level.

I'd also say that you need to learn a range of languages (not well, be adequately). I'd include Fortran, Lisp, Forth as the basic level. Then C for a more advanced level. (Perhaps you *could* do everything in C in Fortran95 instead, but why?)

Finally, at an advanced level, I'd introduce Java, Erlang, Smalltalk, and, Haskell or OCaML. If you want another language after that, Either Ada95 or modern x64 assembler.

And I'd do the whole thing in one year, which means none of the languages are covered in depth. Then pick any one of them, Java if you prefer, for more comprehensive study of algorithms. But *start* with a simplified assembler.

N.B.: There could be a parallel track that was followed based around HTML, Javascript, TCP servers, etc. I don't understand enough about it, because I never studied it, so I only ended up knowning pieces here and there that I picked up for project. I envision these classes intertwined like the Math and Physics classes that I took in college. E.g, the TCP lessons would be needed when the Java(or whatever) classes started to address multiprocessing on multiple computers.

I like Trolltech, but it's probably already owned by someone.

The GP is probably an astroturfer rather than a troll. OTOH, there really *are* idiots who believe that kind of garbage, even after being shafted by MS a couple of times.