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Submission + - 5 year old passed Microsoft Certified Professional

EzInKy writes: The BBC has this heartwarming story about a five year old British boy who is the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional.

He told the BBC he found the exam difficult but enjoyable, and hopes to set up a UK-based tech hub one day.

"There were multiple choice questions, drag and drop questions, hotspot questions and scenario-based questions," he told the BBC Asian Network.

"The hardest challenge was explaining the language of the test to a five-year-old. But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory," explained Ayan's father Asim.

Ayan says he hopes to launch a UK-based IT hub similar to America's Silicon Valley one day, which he intends to call E-Valley.

Comment Re:Scripting language du jour (Score 1) 547

The more I see of python the less I like it. Every time I try to install some python package there is some incompatibility with the system python, or some wierdness in compiling the underlying libraries, and I have to maintain several versions of the language. For some reason it doesn't seem to be backward-compatible, which leads me to question the sanity of whoever decided to make it that way. It is way worse than perl that at least 'just works' a lot more of the time. Maybe it's just me?
Perl

Goodbye, World? 5 Languages That Might Not Be Long For This World 547

Nerval's Lobster writes As developers embrace new programming languages, older languages can go one of two ways: stay in use, despite fading popularity, or die out completely. So which programming languages are slated for history's dustbin of dead tech? Perl is an excellent candidate, especially considering how work on Perl6, framed as a complete revamp of the language, began work in 2000 and is still inching along in development. Ruby, Visual Basic.NET, and Object Pascal also top this list, despite their onetime popularity. Whether the result of development snafus or the industry simply veering in a direction that makes a particular language increasingly obsolete, time comes for all platforms at one point or another. Which programming languages do you think will do the way of the dinosaurs in coming years? With COBOL still around, it's hard to take too seriously the claim that Perl or Ruby is about to die. A prediction market for this kind of thing might yield a far different list.
Privacy

The Executive Order That Redefines Data Collection 126

sandbagger writes: " ...it is often the case that one can be led astray by relying on the generic or commonly understood definition of a particular word." That quote apparently applies to words offering constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure. TechDirt looks at the redefinition of the term "collection" as redefined by Executive Order 12333 to allow basically every information dragnet, provided no-one looks at it. "Collection" is now defined as "collection plus action." According to this document, it still isn't collected, even if it has been gathered, packaged and sent to a "supervisory authority." No collection happens until examination. It's Schrodinger's data, neither collected nor uncollected until the "box" has been opened. This leads to the question of aging off collected data/communications: if certain (non) collections haven't been examined at the end of the 5-year storage limit, are they allowed to be retained simply because they haven't officially been collected yet? Does the timer start when the "box" is opened or when the "box" is filled?

Comment Re:Do you think the Chinese worker's quality of li (Score 1) 444

Probably, yes. Paying people to do things cheaply does not necessarily improve their life. The quality of life of a hunter gatherer is arguably better than that of a farm worker, and the quality of life of a farm worker is arguably better than that of a factory worker. None of this stops people converting from hunter gatherers to farmers to factory workers, because they want more resources and stability to look after their their children, but it doesn't usually work out that way. The extra 'richness' tends to support larger and larger populations of children, and richer and richer elites, while the quality of life of individuals does not get better on the whole.

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