French Guiana is not a colony of France. It is a departement d'outre-mer, with the same legal status and participation in French government as any of the continental departements. It is analogous to the relationship Hawaii has to the United States, with full statehood and participation in US government.

My first language in college was Pascal. It's not a bad choice IMO. In part, perhaps, because it is a (pretty much) *dead* language - sort of like Latin for programming languages. Which means you *can't* get stuck on it, you *have to* move on to other languages. One disadvantage is that it may not be rich enough to use to teach concepts found in more modern languages, like objects/classes (although there are OO extensions for Pascal), maps/dictionaries, etc.

OK, then, what should the teaching language be? What language would be better for teaching basic concepts and principles of programming, e.g. algorithms, data structures, control flow, events, etc.? Assembly language for MOS6502, perhaps?

TFA should have mentioned that Simons has given large amounts of money to Brookhaven National Labs to keep the RHIC running.

I wasn't referring to any side. But to answer your question... well, I'm not sure I can. Certainly it was understandable for the Iraqi military to fight back against the US invasion. But as for terrorists/insurgents... are they necessarily acting on behalf of or under the orders of their country? Are they legitimate war combatants? Hard to say. There is a government in Iraq, for whatever it's worth, and any attacks on an invading or occupying force should, it seems to me, occur at their behest.

But it doesn't address the 27 degree angle screen. Round is the only way to go.

I have QWERTYUIOP on my Android phone. It pops up when I need it and it goes away when I don't - which is most of the time. I, too, used to insist on smartphones with physical keyboards, but I have come to find that a virtual keyboard with Swype is just as good if not better.

Private businesses (e.g. sole proprietorships, simple partnerships, etc.), yes. Corporations, no. Corporations are not people no matter what the Supreme Court says.

That depends, I'd say. Killing an enemy who is attacking or invading your country, or poses a clear and present danger to your country's security is OK, IMO.

...they'd better offer an in-place upgrade from Windows 7. Nobody (well, almost nobody) is going to back everything up, do a fresh OS install that blows away the old one, and then reinstall everything and reconfigure everything. It just takes too damn long. I'm thinking about moving my Dad from his XP machine to a Chromebook for exactly this reason - I'd upgrade him to Win8, except you can't do that.

I've never really understood why people continue to get so excited about what basically would have been the Canadian version of the MiG-25, only slower. An F-15 or Su-27 could wax this thing's ass any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

...we should do it to ourselves, too. The entire Western world should adopt a carbon tax, and implement it as a tarriff on any country that doesn't adopt it voluntarily. The money raised should be dumped into nuclear fusion development.

Back in the early-mid '90s there was an active-suspension version of the Infiniti Q45. The engineers at the time said they could make the car lean into turns, but they didn't because test audiences found it too disconcerting.

All of which you agreed to when choosing to use Facebook. Believe it or not, you don't have to use it.

Ever heard of pre-cana?