Not sure they had the word "science fiction" in 1914. Not even sure when "scientifiction" was coined.

Or find a better one. I recommend you try "How to Design Programs", an intro to Scheme, which, despite its syntax, is a very decently designed language. You can buy the book for money, or download it for free. (there's two versions. The newer one is more fun. The older one is more finished.) Racket is the implementation that's designed to work with it, and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. For free.
The book is about program design, not about piecing together fragments found on the web.
The Racket mailing list is a place where students can actually ask questions and often get the language designers and implementers to answer even trivial questions.
Try it. It won't take long, and you will learn.
To the extent you are already experienced, you will find the beginning a bit tedious. So skim through until you reach your level.

-- hendrik

About Lisp --- yes, ancient academics still use it. But the cutting edge of Lisping seems to be Scheme these days, and its very much alive indeed, with implementations like Racket (with excellent educational resources), Gambit (which gets along well with C), guile (the FSF's scripting language), and many others, In the user communities around Racket, for example, you see an eagerness to try new things and redesign the language for future generations.

-- hendrik

After all, Dover reprints those old relics of math books precisely because they *are* still relevant.

-- hendrik

You can volunteer your servers to soylentnews.org.

Evidently not on mine. It's the mostly white screen that leaves an afterimage on my eyes. We must be different. Maybe there's a hint here about making options available.

-- hendrik

Maybe if it is necessary for whatever reason to migrate slashdot to a new visual format and you let slashdot.org point to the new format site you should hang onto your user base by making something like, say, alpha.slashdot.org point to the the same textual content in the old format. It wouldn't bother me at all to have my bookmarks point to alpha.slashdot.org instead of slashdot.org. And for those few devices for which the new format works better, I'll still be able to use the new format.

If it manages to preserve your user base (which surely would contribute to profitability), maybe it would be worthwhile?

Actually, I'd prefer white text on a black background.. When I'm using a slightly out-of-focus screen, it's more readable. What's more, it's not as blindingly bright at night and it's not as likely to wake my wife up.

The schools tend to teach history in terms wars, royalty, and loyalty to country.
I won't pretend that understanding the dynamics of conflict isn't important.
But the history of technology is an extremely important part of history that's usually given short shrift.

-- hendrik

Is there any substantial support for the slashdot beta?

-- hendrik

There's a war on science in this country. It's a disaster. And it'll continue at least until the next election, which may be years away. I'm ashamed of what's happening to my country.

-- hendrik, a Canadian.

My wife, a doctor, tells me the tests cannot detect 30-year-old cocaine use, but can detect recent cocaine use. So the implication is that the patient was using recently and was lying.

Air-gapped? You must not have heard about wifi yet.

-- hendrik

The bandwidth of a truck full of magnetic tapes goes to zero as everything is erased.

-- hendrik

Actually, there are a few systems that have to be rotated throughh 720 degrees to achieve their original state. Perhaps the SMBC anomaly really shows that USB plugs are spin one-half particles.