Abelson and Sussman is a delightful book for programming theorists. Scheme is a big improvement over Common LISP. Learning Scheme from Abelson and Sussman is straightforward for people who can get into MIT.

This is not most of the programming population. As someone else pointed out, programming today is mostly the creation of glue code to tie together a number of (usually buggy) components. Neither the webcrap crowd nor the appcrap crowd needs Scheme. In fact, if you have that strong a theoretical background, you tend to overdesign simple programs.

If Microsoft hadn't built such insecure operating systems, the problem wouldn't be so big. This is the company that brought you Active-X, autorun, and the ability to invoke programs from spreadsheets and documents.

Python isn't a bad first language. It has all the important advanced concepts - objects, dictionaries, closures, and threads. The syntax is reasonable. Some people are bothered by the forced indentation, but for new programmers, it will seem natural.

Most of the problems with Python are performance related. They come from obscure features of the language, such as the ability to do "getattr" and "setattr" on almost anything, including objects running in another thread. So everything has to be a dictionary. (This is sometimes called the Guido von Rossum Memorial Boat Anchor.) PyPy is struggling hard to overcome that, with some success. (The optimization approach is "oh, no, program did Obscure Awful Thing which could invalidate running code" - abandon compiled JIT code, shift to backup interpreter, flush JIT code cache, execute Obscure Awful Thing, wait for control to leave area of Obscure Awful Thing while in backup interpreter, rerun JIT compiler, resume running compiled code.)

Already being done for car insurance if you allow a monitoring device to plug into your car's computer port.

In general (but not complete) agreement. I still have a significant privacy concern regarding how else any data are used by ~third parties affiliated with the data collector~ (as many privacy policies word it).

While your comment sounds like over-the-top sarcasm, keep in mind the time when you go to the dentist and your dental insurance company refuses to pay their portion of the bill because you have not been brushing your teeth properly....

Yeah, no. You can't enumerate every permutation of every weapon imaginable. At some point, you have to expect an adult to assess a new situation using generally acceptable principals to reach a reasonable conclusion.

Ask a random guy on the street whether Scala is a declarative language and you should expect a random distribution. Ask him whether a disassembled rifle is a weapon and you should expect a solid "yes". You shouldn't need to train on that.

Also, this guy was a dumbass.

The parent wasn't quite right, in reality software flies your airplane 100% of your journey right now.

Modern Boeing and Airbus designs are pure fly by wire. 100% of the time you fly it though software. The engines are FADEC (full authority digital engine controls).

Autoland has been a thing since the early 70s. The first aircraft to have it, the Hawker Siddeley Trident 3 (an aircraft similar to the Boeing 727 in layout - three engines at the back of the aircraft and T-tailed) was flying autolandings in pretty much zero visibility decades ago.

Since all modern large airliners are fly by wire, you're screwed anyway.

Airliners have multiple redundant power buses. Each engine has a generator, and there is also an APU (auxilliary power unit) which has a generator. If all three fail (for example, because the plane ran out of fuel, it's happened, or flies through a flock of Canada geese and loses all engines and for some reason the APU won't start) there is a ram air turbine that sticks out into the airflow and powers a generator. There is also a mandated amount of reserve battery power. Talking of losing all engine power, the Airbus A320 that went in the Hudson has purely electronic controls, and remained controllable after a double engine failure.

They glide much better than a brick. I think a typical airliner has something like a 16:1 glide ratio so from a cruise heigh of 11km could glide 176km (over 100 miles).

That's not how it works at all.

Airliners pretty much since the jet age have had at least some measure of "envelope protection". In the 60s this was pretty simple - just a stick pusher to prevent stalls since stalls in many airliners can easily become unrecoverable. Airbus's envelope protection is much more sophisticated than just a stick pusher.

However when there's a systems failure the Airbus systems will automatically drop to a different control law that effectively works like basic stick and rudder flying.

Boeing uses fly by wire now too by the way.

A little harsh but dead accurate. They're not legally obligated to sue the grieving parents. They could even draw up a contract and sell them limited rights to have this one statue in perpetuity for a dollar, or some such. For PR reasons, the DC rep could even donate the dollar to the rights purchaser.

There are many ways DC could do this, legally and protected, without being asswipes. They chose "fuck 'em; none of the above".

That, or they could be normal decent non-fuckhead humans and let a little boy have a grave that looks like the hero he wanted to be. I prefer that option.

True. Removing the fog is very expensive. It can be done, though. Watch Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of (FIDO)