Good point. Yet another example is in-flight wifi like Gogo - not only do those guys rely heavily on caching, they'll even do things like recompress jpegs on the fly to be smaller. I'll sidestep the debate around whether that is good or bad, but another consequence of HTTPS-only web is that stuff like that has the potential to get even slower.
I do worry about the downsides of this in terms of how it'll cause higher load on servers because of higher traffic. That said, all major CDNs support HTTPS on the edges and non-HTTPS between the origin and the CDN, so they'll be fine. Where this will probably hurt more is with forward proxies at universities and businesses and transparent intermediate caches at ISPs.
I've dabbled a bit in Kivy myself, but hadn't considered it for the kids - that's an interesting idea, and using the kivy launcher would let them get to see their program running on the device while avoiding the tedium/delay of building a full apk. I think it's a little beyond where they are at now but it could be the next-next stepping stone for them - thank you for the suggestion.
Good call - that appears to be the sort of thing I'm looking for, I'll check it out. Thanks!
Thanks for the recommendation - much appreciated.
Haha, yeah - ironically it seems like it was far more accessible back then in a way. You could reasonably know a little bit (or even a lot) about nearly everything, and when you did use something higher level you knew pretty much everything about how it worked behind the scenes.
Speaking of BBSs, and an example of what was enough to catch my interest back then, I once wrote TDSANSI.SYS, a drop-in replacement for the standard ANSI.SYS. It extended the set of ANSI escape sequences so you could do higher level things like drawing text boxes or repeating characters, the net result being that a BBS could do their "fancy" UIs in far less characters sent across the wire. The funny thing was that people who used it loved the speed but couldn't stand the fact that it used like 40KB of their 640KB of RAM.
I think I was in high school at the time and it was a ridiculously nerdy project, but that was something I really got into, and yet I can't imagine asking my high school son to think in those terms nowadays. I'm guessing that's part of what needs to change - just because I came up through learning a certain path, it doesn't mean that's a good or practical way to do it anymore. Basically nobody needs to work at that level these days, so it only makes sense that he'd focus on more of an application level.
Hey, this looks very promising - thanks so much for the recommendation!
I guess in some ways I got into programming because computers were a novelty and there wasn't an endless supply of free stuff, so in many ways programming was the entertainment. But now there is gobs of relatively high quality and free stuff to entertain that also
So the "problem" is that there is an endless stream of stuff competing for my kids' attention that (a) is of a quality leagues beyond anything they can hope to do anytime soon and (b) gives
I'm always searching for something that does a good job of being an intermediate level - I can get my kids to do a lot of the intro / visual programming stuff and they like it, but then they run into this seemingly huge chasm when they try to go beyond that. It's like, "ok, so now you made a rudimentary game that runs inside this special environment on some website. You want to advance to something more flexible? Ok, um, now we need to talk about files and directories and a whole slew of tools and junk you never knew existed or were needed. Also, prepare to start typing a lot and using all those punctuation characters you rarely use in school assignments. And don't get me started if you want to get your little game onto a device so you can show your friends!"
On the one hand I think it's just part of getting into "real" programming and they just have to suck it up and deal with it. But I really think one or two of my kids could really get into programming and really like it, but I've yet to help them get over that hump from super basic stuff.
Yeah, this might be too broad of a generalization, but it seems common that when a person learns an additional language really well they tend to avoid at least some of the common grammar mistakes that native speakers make (which makes sense, because in learning the language they have to commit to memory actual rules of some sort, while a native speaker just sort of knows the language intuitively and often has trouble articulating the specifics of e.g. conjugation patterns).
IMO what's cool is that learning an additional language gives you insight into your native language's eccentricities and can help you improve your use of your native language.
Yeah, "broken English" is more of a tongue in cheek term, although what's interesting to me is that a non-native person is the one who referred to it that way to me (a tour guide in Hong Kong FWIW). His point - and I agree and I think you do too, to some extent - is that while the use of English-as-spoken-by-a-native-English-speaker is growing, it is still relatively small, but a form of simplified English as a kind of universal common tongue is pretty widespread.
And while I agree that English is taking over for historical/financial (and technical) reasons, IMO a lot of the drive *currently* is because English is whatever "everybody else" is learning too - it has momentum to become the go-to lingua franca all over the place.
Because English isn't
As others have noted, the number of native speakers of a language is different than the number of people that can speak a language, and that's where English pulls ahead.
The most widely known language in the world is "broken English" - there are a lot of native English speakers, a ton more who know it very well as a second language with a good degree of proficiency, and then a huge, huge, huge number more that can get by in English passably well.
By convincing yourself it's driven by hate, it allows you to brush aside the debate while feeling good about yourself because you've taken some moral high road.
How exactly did you come to this conclusion anyway? Why are you so convinced that this has to be hate-driven and that there can't be any possible explanation?
You have zeroed in on a particular motivation and have decided that it can be this and nothing else, and you somehow known even better than the people themselves what is driving them? You don't allow for the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is an explanation beyond mass dishonesty and/or self-delusion?
To latch on to something so implausible seems silly. Is the alternative - that some people are being rational but genuinely feel differently than you - too terrifying a prospect to deal with? Why isn't it simply possible for you to accept that the "other side" is not driven by hate?
The scenario with a bag of bagels isn't one of the ones causing an issue, so as an example it doesn't apply. That type of transaction is fine - that the buyer is gay or whatever is irrelevant, it has no bearing on the transaction, it has no reason to come up. It'd be quite a stretch to say that by selling them some bagels you are endorsing them in any way.
The issue is with scenarios when the sexual orientation *is* relevant in the transaction and where participating in it can be interpreted as endorsement. Should someone be able to politely decline to participate in that transaction? It seems reasonable to allow it, that's all. What if it's a KKK rally? Or a Nazi rally? It could be any number of things that one person finds objectionable and another doesn't. Is the concept of civil liberties so completely eroded that we balk at people being free to choose whether or not they participate in such a thing?
So a more relevant example would be the wedding photographer. This isn't someone who is trying to shut down the gay wedding, they are not trying to make a spectacle of things. They would simply prefer to not participate and reserve the right to let someone else have that business.
It seems wildly unconstitutional and not a little ominous for the government to swoop in and *force* that photographer to be a part of it. If anyone's rights are being infringed in that situation, the photographer has at *least* as much claim on infringed rights as the people getting married.
Obviously, people can disagree with the photographer and boycott his services if they want and let market forces either keep him in or put him out of business. That's fine - he's not asking for any special treatment under the law, so if he goes out of business, so be it. That we're even talking about it being ok for the government to force him to enter into transactions seems ludicrous.
Yeah, I'm hoping this one was just an outlier and not a trend. I mean, people swap shifts all the time for various reasons, so it seems ominous that he should be suspended for asking around if someone would trade with him, especially since he express a willingness to work the event in some other capacity. The reaction just seems way too extreme.
No, what the law probably does is unfairly punish people who would otherwise let bygones be bygones to the point of them rising up and pushing back.
I just love how tolerance is all the rage and the freedom of choice is paramount - as long as it's tolerance in favor of LGBT and it's the freedom to choose to live an LGBT lifestyle. The moment someone just wants to be left alone and quietly and peacefully do their thing, they are labeled bigots and we call on the government to swoop in and stop them.
Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. -- Booth Tarkington
