Being able to quickly get the shell of a project working in a new language is a good mark of at least a good programmer. You know how to solve the problem (hopefully with some best practices), you just need to get the syntax working.

Windmills may or may not be better for the environment than nuke power, but the places you can put a nuke power station are more limited compared to where you can put a windmill.

No not spying, just what settings she has available to control access to her posts and such.

When I want to spy on her I just have her log into facebook for me and we sit and look it all over together.

Fortunately, I think the wife and I have done a good job on raising her, so we've never had an issue with her getting involved in anything inappropriate...

Only reason I got onto facebook was to see what my daughter could be doing (in terms of privacy settings, etc). Still no twitter, linked in, etc. But I do have a /. account (obviously), fark.com, a few forums, etc. None using my real name of course.

Guess you could always get your own domain, host it yourself, and install fingerd. Then just tell the folks that think something is wrong to finger you....

I'd say knowing which species of snake live in your area, and how to tell the difference between venomous and non-venomous look-a-likes (coral snake or eastern king snake? water moccasin or banded water snake?) makes you smart - you've prepared yourself for what we referred to as "activities of daily life" when I worked in physical rehab/therapy. Although running across a snake and having to ID it as potentially lethal vs nonlethal isn't a daily occurence (at least I hope not... and I live in the woods).

Being smart and/or intelligent isn't the same as knowing a lot of facts. Google can help you keep a lot of facts at your fingertips. The smart part (or intelligent part) is being able to learn about complex things, applying things you already know to new situations, etc.

Google may ruin a game of Trivial Pursuit (or bar trivia or whatever) but it isn't a substitute for doing a good job planning a process, designing a machine, etc.

Sorta like turnitin.com's business model. Require students to give you their content in order to get a grade, and scrape the web for text content. Sell lookups of newly submitted content against that content archive back to educational institutions. Then start up a pre-processing service for students to check their submissions against first before they submit to the teacher for a grade.

We had 5 1/4" floppy floppies in the 80s. And saved data on audio cassette. And even had 2.88mb 3.5" floppies that weren't floppy. Heck, some of us even had *gasp* hard drives!

I did it by eliminating extra sugar. Doc warned me I was pushing hte pre-diabetic stage with my morning blood sugar.

No more sweet tea, coke, or adding sugar to my coffee. Sucked for about a week, after that, no problems, and I've dropped 30lbs with no real effort other than breaking the sugar habit in that first week.

Quit smoking 2 weeks ago, we'll see how that part goes and if I end up gaining weight back ('cause food will taste better, supposedly, or maybe just noshing as a replacement for having a smoke ... so far hasn't happened)

This is a lot like what the Israeli screeners ask of you when you are being checked out.

However, the real difference is the Israelis actually have highly educated and trained people doing this checking and investigation.

Did Pero get none due to the winner of the state taking all of that state's EVs or did he not carry a single precinct? Think the "winner takes the state's EVs" rule kinda disenfranchises a lot of folks, esp in states like New York where the red rural areas *always* loose out to the Big D Big Apple.

Who cares. I found my Loki Publishing copy of Descent3d a few weeks ago, and I have access to a planetarium dome projector that runs at 1600x1600 :) ....

Gonna see if I can get it running on a current kernel w/ a relatively current (ie, only 6 year old) nVidia card, then see about at least recording and then projecting on teh screen if thats what it takes...

In the same boat, at least on a presidential level. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever get any better on a national level, and we'll always have to choose between Kang and Kodos. Maybe in 2016 I'll vote Kang instead.
 

Indeed, if it comes down to having to pick the OS based on what software package(s) you need/want or might need/want in the future because of what a coworker/costudent did/does/wants to do, then I'd start with a Mac laptop. You can virtualize a machine (or three) if you need Windows, Linux, BSD, whatever other environment available, but AFAIK for non-Mac hardware there is no (legal) way to run OS X. Load it up with RAM, make sure you have several large external drives for backing up stuff, and off you go. If you knew you would absolutely never need OS X based software then get PC based and shop based on percieved hardware quality and warranty.

As to her study abroad stuff, may want to make sure whatever she ends up with the warranty can be used wherever is she is going to physically end up wtih the device. Would suck to be working in Europe but need to get a service call from the US, or having to ship back and forth for repair...

Heck the govn't has its own TLD and doesn't even use it for all of their hostnames...

Quick - where is the "official" place to get your free annual credit report? Is it freeannualreport.com or freeannualcreditreport.com or what? Wouldn't it be nice if it were creditreport.ftc.gov ? I (and most other slashdot users who get a little paranoid about this type of thing) simply go to the FTC site and follow the link from there, but having it on a .gov domain would let me know for sure some squatter didn't get ahold of it...