When I was a grad student at Bell Labs in 1983, a senior programmer told me about how she first programmed, when the labs were in New York City. She would write her program VERY carefully, punch the cards, put them in her briefcase, and fly to Washington, D.C. where she had access to a computer. She would give the deck to the attendant, wait a few minutes, receive her output, go back to the airport, and fly back to New York.

How about C. H. Lindsey's Informal Introduction to Algol 68? Obviously he isn't going to be using Algol 68, but this is beautifully and wittily written, describes a language with some interesting features, and has a very unusual two-dimensional organization.

A technique I've seen used for scientific purposes is to run a Zener diode in the high slope region and subtract DC, leaving a residue of quantum noise. I would think that with current technology such a package could be very small and cheap, though I don't know what is involved in reshaping the spectrum from 1/f in hardware.

I wonder why it is so insanely expensive (US$250). That won't help it catch on.

No. The heirs are not responsible for the debts of the estate. The debts are paid by the executor out of the assets of the estate. The heirs are paid out of what remains of the estate. If the debts exceed the assets, the heirs receive nothing, but they do not assume any part of the debt.

Actually, no. The debts of the deceased are paid out of the estate. The heirs are paid out of the remainder of the estate. The heirs do not inherit the debt. If the estate is not sufficient to satisfy the debt, the heirs may receive nothing, but they never inherit any debt.

What you are describing is the fact that software and to a considerable extent computer hardware do not follow standards comparable to those used in better established areas of engineering.

People who give to a charity for good reasons do not need special identification on their vehicles to let the police know that they deserve special treatment.

We don't have to speculate. California law severely limits the enforcement of non-competes. It seems to work well there, so it probably will in Massachusetts.

According to my physician father, the first proven case of an environmental cause for cancer was that of smoked meat and fish in Iceland causing colon cancer. This is a long established relationship, not a recent fad.

How about a slight modification of a classic: Just change the background color of the display. Even 1 byte RGB gives you 256 messages. (I guess lighting would affect this.)

The other issue is, though, how much would such a system contribute to flight safety. Information about what went wrong may contribute in the long term to flight safety, but in the short term such systems won't prevent crashes. They will just tell us where to look for the bodies.

Actually, as I understand it, the lack of support for Unicode is a deliberate security measure. The fear is that including some "characters" would damage the page, and that, of course, malicious posters would take advantage of this.

While some teachers are just plain incompetent or ignorant, that is not the only factor leading to poor performance. Here are several more: (a) teacher training is poor. Far too much time is devoted to topics like philosophy of education and social issues, too little to things like subject knowledge, normal and abnormal language acquisition, how to teach reading, and so forth. For example, I know of teacher education programs in which teachers, including those destine to be elementary school teachers, are not taught how to teach children to read, which is probably the single most important thing they do. In one case, as part of a seminar, the students read and discussed two papers on approaches to the teaching of reading; that was the entire extent of their training in how to teach reading! (b) excessive diversity of students is very difficult for a teacher to deal with. You only have the time and resources to individualize instruction so much. If the students are at very different levels, even a good teacher can't do a good job. The mainstreaming of students with disabilities has exacerbated this problem. I don't mean to suggest a return to rigid tracking or to dumping all special needs kids in separate classes or schools, but we need some combination of classes that are more homogeneous as to level and ability together with adequate support (in the form of teachers' aides and other resources) for special needs students. (c) school administrations and government departments of education often impose poor curricula and materials. Greater competence and less political interference in the education bureaucracy would be a boon.

Actually, freedom of speech is intended to protect people who, by their speech, upset other people. Otherwise virtually any expression of an unpopular view could be prosecuted since somebody would be upset by it. The Holy Thursday and Good Friday liturgies of the Greek Orthodox Church to this day ascribe to Jews such as myself the guilt for the death of Christ. Naturally, we find this upsetting. Do you think that the Greek Orthodox Church and its priests should be prosecuted? That is why in countries with strong protection for freedom of expression there are strict limitations on the ability to retaliate for speech, e.g. requiring that defamation be objectively false in order to be actionable.