I never understood how they planned to get Mexicans to wear those collars anyway

You've been on the site that long and you still think that's funny?

Are you honestly that naive? Really? What do you suppose they're doing? Do I have to let him come in and kill someone before I can do something about it? I don't agree with the right-wing in the US on much, but at least they think my life is valuable enough that I should be entitled to defend it. It's absolutely pathetic when people value the lives of criminals more important than the people just trying to live their lives and have the audacity to consider it "civilized". So much sympathy for criminals and yet mysteriously little for their intended victims.

Brilliant. "Let's not trouble ourselves about the guy breaking into our house at 2am. He's probably here to retrieve our overdue library books."

Good thing you gave the issue serious thought instead of just replying with a pithy, holier-than-thou one-liner.

Why would it be any ISPs job to enforce the laws? That sounds like law enforcement's job. This makes no more sense than holding the people that put in your driveway responsible for ensuring you obey traffic laws.

Well, they did overreact on the punishment. Fine them, sure. But a year in prison for spoofing caller id? Really guys? The cost to taxpayers for that is worse than the harm of letting them spoof.

I'm not sure if it tells us anything about what kind of life we might find elsewhere in the universe. If they find life on Mars, I think there's a fair chance that life or some of its makings was transplanted from Mars to Earth or vice versa, and would therefore have some inherent similarities. Plus, Earth and Mars formed from the same dust cloud, giving them many of the same raw materials. They have fairly similar sizes and orbits, all of which could predispose life to develop in similar ways.

Of course, finding life on Mars would be a huge scientific breakthrough, but to generalize about the requirements of life throughout the galaxy or the universe we need a far larger data set, which is obviously centuries off. If they determine that life evolved independently on Earth and Mars, that's another huge discovery that tells us a lot about how common life is, but not necessarily what shapes it will take. There are legitimate reasons to suspect all life might require water, but we're a bit biased by our own circumstances.

Being arrested in China because the government doesn't like you is a risk that can outweigh a huge profit margin.

And also, how much profit can you really make if the government is using these sorts of tactics to impose price controls?

You can rail against the injustice of it all you want, but when someone has to go through 30 applications for 1 job opening (and maybe they've got a dozen other jobs to fill each with 30 of their own applicants), they're not going to sit down and learn everyone's life story. They've got to get the list down to a handful to actual look at in depth, and to do that they're going to use shortcuts. After they throw out the ones that are clearly not qualified, they're going to look at things like spelling, grammar, and (depending on who's doing the reviewing), maybe your @aol.com address. Therefore, ditching an AOL address is one more little tweak you can make to your resume to keep it in the pile.

You seem to be under the impression that the hiring process is about you, or justice or fairness or something. They don't care about you. They generally just want to find someone qualified reasonably quickly. When they've got one more interview slot and two similar applicants, little things can make a difference.

forgot to include my actual point in that message: judging people for having used AOL in the past is a bit harsh :) Just about everyone goes through the training wheel stage. Just don't get stuck there forever.

Fair enough, but I was about 13 when we had AOL, so not my choice. :)

But we should also remember that the reason we disdain AOL and/or its users is directly tied to the reason it was successful. It's the internet with training wheels. In the mid to late 90s there was a huge demand for just that, but now the world's grown up and people are expected to be able to ride on their own. (and now that everyone has at least one 'computer person' in their family it's practical for people to learn from each other instead of working it out themselves on services like AOL). All this is exactly why people are going to be judged for having AOL emails: it announces to the world that you're taking your first baby steps into the world of computing.

Really? Pretty much everyone with any tech savvy abandoned aol years ago. Also, anyone with any tech savvy knows how AOL is regarded. So if you apply for a tech job with an @aol, you're telling them you're either clueless, stubborn, or just totally lacking in common sense. All of those seem like valid reasons to toss an application if you need to thin the pile. For a less tech-oriented job I wouldn't consider it such a big deal, but with so many jobs requiring some level of computer usage, who wants to hire someone with AOL-level computer skills?

Would a nutritionist apply with an @mcdonalds.com email? A truck driver with an @alcoholicsanonymous email? It's just common sense.

recommendations on a sale-level; people who bought this also bought that, 57% people on this page bought this item, the others went here, combo deals with books you viewed before, etc. You'd think they would be able to come up with a system for the taxes

Not the same thing at all. There's no legal repercussions for bad recommendations, and the other features are only mildly clever algorithms. Paying taxes requires understanding and then keeping up to date with tax codes in what must be 10s or 100s of thousands of jurisdictions then filing the appropriate paperwork and submitting the payments. There's state, county and city level and even other entities like levy districts which can overlap the boundaries of the other levels. If anyone can, Amazon can probably manage it, but you can't just target Amazon with a rule like this. You'd be sinking a lot of smaller online retailers who can't manage all the insane complexity.

I agree completely, glad to see a voice of reason in here. Submitter sounds a bit too eager to turn his brother into his little nerd minion. Kid is 12 and submitter is already dragging him into the c++ uber alles wars. It's not about this vs that language or platform or what *submitter* considers the One True Path. Just give him something where he can see results.

The first things I played with were Logo and Hypercard, which I think used a variant of AppleScript. Neither is at all relevant to the real world, but they were good starting points. No fancy editors or tool chains, just a little coding for quick results. The only special feature I'd consider useful is syntax highlighting to help them spot mistakes. He's not going to be creating big enough programs that he'll need anything else, and he certainly doesn't need to be bogged down learning obscure vi or emacs commands or complex tool chains. At most an editor like jEdit or Notepad++ would be just right, probably with a lot of features disabled or just ignored.

Next steps were javascript (again quick results) and programming my TI-82 (first programs that were actually useful, for math class). Then C++ in highschool, followed shortly by Perl. Learned PHP the summer after highschool, took classes on Scheme, Java, Haskell and Python in college. Of course I don't remember a lot of those now, and this kid probably won't either. So don't try and railroad him cause it won't work anyway.