Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Education

Slashdot Asks: Should Schooling Be Year-Round? 421

Around the world, American schools' long summer break is viewed as an anomaly, and the long summer seems to be getting shorter. While most American primary and secondary schools used to start after Labor Day, more and more of them now open sometime in August (and that's not counting the ones that have gone to a year-round schedule). Some of my younger relatives started a new school year last week (in Indiana), while Baltimore schools start later this month. Both Seattle and Portland's kids have until after Labor Day (with start dates of the 3rd and 4th of September, respectively). The 4th is also the start date for students in New York City's public schools, the country's largest district. Colleges more often start in September, but some get a jump start in August, especially with required seminars or orientation programs for new students. Whether you're in school, out of school, or back in school by proxy (packing lunches or paying tuition), what time does (or did) your school-year start? Would you prefer that your local public schools run all year round, if they're of the long-summer variety? (And conversely, if your local schools give short shrift to summer, whether that's in the U.S. or anywhere else, do you think that's a good idea?)

Comment It's better to hear people you might disagree with (Score 4, Insightful) 124

Closing one's ears to people one might disagree with is a sure way to rot as a community. It's not like the community that attends such conferences is unanimous in their views; it's not *all* technolibertarians. If you look at other presentations by such bodies at past conferences, you see that they're often quite good.

Perl

Perl 5.20 Released, and Mojolicious 5.0: the Very Modern Perl Web Framework 126

Kvorg writes: "Back in 2012 Slashdot noticed how at the time of Perl 5.16, the modern Perl projects, including Mojolicious, formed a new and expanding movement of a Perl Renaissance. With the release of Perl 5.20 and Mojolicious 5.0, the Modern Perl Renaissance is ever more striking. Faster, neater, sharper with its asynchronous APIs, Mojolicious is extremely flexible with its advanced request routing, plugin system, perl templating and hook API. Its adherence to the modern interfaces and standards and its implementation of advanced features in support tools, DOM and CSS selectors makes it easy to program with.

Mojolicious, with its philosophy of optimized code-generation (think metaprogramming), enabled-by-default support for encodings and UTF-8, zero dependency deployment with wide support for existing CPAN packages, zero downtime restarts and fully tested implementations, reminds us of how fun and flexible programming in scripting languages used to be. Of course, integrated documentation and a very supportive bundled development server don't hurt, either. The new Perl release with new postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations makes it all even more fun."

Comment Re:What a crap of title... (Score 1) 450

Thankless means that few people in broad society adequately respect the need for or the practices of police officers. They're underappreciated.

Police don't usually have the time, when people pull a gun on them, to carefully consider every possible option. If they can pick the least bad option, great, but if the situation is that someone pulls a gun on an on-duty cop (meaning pulls it out and begins to point it at them), I'd be very reluctant to second-guess them if the policeman shoots that person.

Comment Doesn't always work all that well... (Score 1) 274

I'm 35. I recently left a startup where most of the people there were about 10 years earlier. The difference is a bit more than age for me - I spent most of the 10 years I had on them working for a University, but the combination of age and differences in interests were very rough - I didn't feel that I fit in, I didn't hang out with them after work, I didn't want the same things out of life, and so on. It can be rough.

Comment Brain damaged project (Score -1) 134

I like how they place an emphasis on it being small, but they require you to link the whole damned thing into your app. And of c ourse that doesn't help you write correct software, because you won't figure out if you really need -lm unless you also test your app on a more correct libc.

Lightweight and correct indeed.

Slashdot Top Deals

Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel

Working...