It's the nice thing about American politics: equal opportunity corruption. Everyone gets their fair share!

What's next, are you going to start talking about how there's a worm hidden in everyone's ring 0? Look, as much fun as it is to fantasize about a super smartly designed virus which "tells windows not to report it" and "doesn't show up in the registry editor" (why a virus would have to write in the registry in the first place is beyond me), they're unlikely to be on your computer. All those botnets you keep hearing about? They're far, far more likely to be built off CatPicturesScreensaver.exe than from some crazily smart drive-by which is completely undetectable and doesn't do anything... until the doomsday comes.

This isn't to say that "visual cues" and "checking stuff" aren't ridiculous, but you're also not a character in a Bond movie.

Wait. They're slowing the group velocity, which isn't what most people think of when they read "velocity".

Group velocity is the speed at which the signal carried by a photon propagates. Essentially, if you look at a moving sine wave, group velocity is the speed at which it's moving. We already know that this velocity can be altered and can even be faster than c. This is different from signal velocity, which is the speed at which the individual photons carrying the signal propagate. Each photon is also a wave thanks to particle-wave duality, so the wave you're analyzing when you look at photons is the wave embodied by every photon you catch. You can't have faster than light communication even if group velocity is higher than c because the signal is still only going at c. The little packets carrying the wave travel slower than the wave's oscillation, essentially.

Altering group velocity is neat and cool, especially doing so in a vacuum, but it's not what a lot of people here believe.

Quite frankly I don't see why religion would be held to a different standard from any other reason people can think of to not get vaccinated. If someone doesn't want to be vaccinated for ideological reasons (say, Big Pharma conspiracy theorist) or because their religion says no, they should be treated the same way: as a potential danger to others. If it means Disney wants to fire them, well, they should be able to, for both of them. To do otherwise would be discrimination!

Which means you'll have variable sound levels for 15-30 years as old cars aren't upgraded to the less noisy sound requirements. Thanks, but no thanks.

If you remove significantly from the second question, then it loses all meaning. Humans could contribute 0.000001% and the answer would still be "yes", but they'd consider it not to be a problem because it's so small.

You want them to learn the abstract concepts of programming. With C, you quickly get bogged down in memory management, notions like pointers, the complete lack of object-oriented programming, awkward functions and weird workarounds like variadic functions. You can learn that stuff after you've understood what a loop is and how variables work.

You can also now use C# to build for Android with Xamarin, which is a platform I find very attractive for learning. You have clearer boundaries, better structure and a much cleaner API than what fully-fledged OS's provide.

I dislike Javascript as an intro course because it's not strict enough. It's better, I find, to start with a stricter language and remove constraints once you're familiar with them. Otherwise, you'll get used to the language doing magic typecasting and to building objects haphazardly, and when you get to a language which requires class definitions and has strong(er) typing, you'll be confused and have to relearn everything. When you do it the other way around, you'll have a tendency to be more structured and to rely less on the language figuring out what you wanted to do.

I still think the best languages for starting out are Java, C# or Python, probably in that order (if Microsoft's open source thing pans out, I'd place C# above Java).

My problems at this point with Java are A) it evolves very, very slowly and B) Oracle. I was far more confident in the language before Oracle took it over.

Never let Linus near Unicode glyphs. The emoticons he'd produce would probably cause a rift in the space-time continuum.

Fortunately, Slashdot doesn't support Unicode, so we're safe.

First time I hear about it as well and surprise surprise, it's another open source project with a terrible name! Every single time, they think they're clever, but just end up being inane.

I have no issue with them being able to call me without legal repercussions... once. After that, it's their job to update their robocall lists. I've informed them that they no longer have the correct number. Any further "mistakes" should be fully punishable.

Sure did, which is why it's going to be funny to watch them try to criticize Obama for implementing it. Remember, this is the Republicans we're talking about here.

You make it sound like the French were late to the party.