The real loaded weapons are these people waiting to go off. And without guns, they won't be stopped. They will resort to other things. Poisonings? Gassings? Bombings? Stabbings and slashings? What will we hope to take away from EVERYONE then? Gasoline? Propane?

This argument fails. Unstable people become dangerous when they have an especially depressing week, or they go off the meds. Suicides and homicides happen in this window. If assault weapons aren't at hand then assault weapons won't be used. These are different to bombs, poison or even handguns and rifles. Bombs and mass poisonings take time to plan, by which time a person will usually stabilize again. Stabbings are less likely to be fatal, or numerous, or even successful, and they require more courage. Even handguns or non-automatic rifles take time to load or are harder to aim. But access to an assault rifle with a high-capacity magazine mean that almost anyone can reliably put on a massacre. It's much easier to prevent access to such weapons than to make mental illness disappear. When the US Constitution was written, muskets could be loaded and fired three times per minute, if you had practiced well. That was plenty for the purpose of self-defense, or for the people to hold the government to account. There's no constitutional argument for assault weapons, and the "people will just use bombs" argument fails when the dynamics of mental illness are considered.

Mimic was my all-time #1 bad-science movie, for one single, monumental plot hole. In order to develop, the mega-roaches needed selection pressures to favour those that resembled humans, but no humans or other predators were even aware of them, let alone selectively killing off the non-humanoid ones.

We have a winner. There has to be something they themselves want to accomplish by programming. Get that sorted and get out of the way.

I used to have books of (printed!) computer game programs that I would type into my Atari 800XL, which of course led to writing my own once I knew how they worked, and friends with the same interests playing my games and me playing theirs. There was a 1986 edition of Scientific American which had a Mandelbrot set on the cover, and the algorithm inside, and I remember when the first six-hour run successfully produced a 40x40 image of the whole set.

The right tech now depends on what they want to accomplish. But get them to imagine themselves showing their friends their OWN phone app, or web app (whether a game or something else), and you won;t have to worry about their motivation from then on. You just need to be there for questions when they hit a roadblock.

And if they don't like programming, help them be good at what they do like.

I can't use my mod points when I've posted in the thread.

Mod +1 Informative...

I would say mod parent up... But remembered that *I* have mod points. MAHAHAHAHHHH!!!!

Seriously, you just say: "You know that ANYONE can do that, yeah?" when they like something a computer does.

Myself, I took the 1986 Scientific American article with the fractals on the cover and coded up the algorithm on little PC with 64K or RAM, and never looked back. I've used to assume that the question for a ten year old would be "Would you like to write your own game?" ... But actually, it's "What do computers do that is cool?" and the realization that literally _anyone_ can do that. It's a level playing field. Anything you can see on a computer, you can take apart or rebuild, and then change to make it do what you want.

No, the competition is, for example, .NET, which is unable to win.

Spread across a whole profession that's somewhat more significant that it seems. it's equal to every sixth person getting an hour less sleep. Still not groundbreaking, but at least indicative.

I once made a 13 minute loop of rain sounds for a friend who was in a mental hospital. It was 18 mins originally, but 13 after removing every time a car stopped, or plain flew by, or anything else that would have created a cognizable pattern. Very soothing stuff.

His claim to have written "software you use everyday" is giflib; he stopped maintaining it in 1994, but it's in lots of browsers and browsing devices.

Virtually everyone at my church brings their Bibles on cellphones for when they need to refer to a text; no reason to carry a chunky paper book around as well. Your old eyes can set whatever point size you like. I suspect that visitors think they're all texting or on Facebook (even when they're not).

The problem is cracking new languages, often having no written script. That's what Bible Translators mainly do.

Here in Australia, we get American and English magazines equally. I hardly ever burn ISO's for Linux, but rather buy a magazine every few months and so have good-quality boot/install/recover disks around all the time. The articles aren't bad -- I've learned about some cool apps there -- but I buy the mags for the disks mainly. And they're all UK magazines, now that I think about it. This presumably goes back to when Amigas and C64s were hip; there were always gaming magazines with playable demo disks.

Mod parent up. I don't know whether profiling works or not, but that final comment was certainly tacked on without justification.

1. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. Reasonable statement. ... P.
2. Therefore P.

Their work-week is now in sync with Aust and NZ, rather than only having four days that coincide.

Belief is not a specifically religious word, and it means neither 'assuming' nor 'proving'. If another person knows X, and tells you X, and you deem them informed and trustworthy, then you may 'believe' what they tell you, and with good reason. You now know X, not because you have proved it, but because you have grounds for trusting someone who (you also believe) does know. Most of what most of us know about science is known by 'faith' in the trustworthiness of the scientific community and what we know of it's values and processes; we 'believe' that it is mostly objective and usually self-correcting over time, even when funding sources, vested interests and career advancement are considered. It helps that this has been borne out in my own limited experience, and it helps that I am unaware of any obviously superior or even competitive alternative to this process for arriving at knowledge of the natural world. I also believe that science is generally the application of common sense to specialised domains of knowledge, and that if I had the time and data I would come to the same conclusions. These are subjective judgements; hence 'beliefs'. I also belief that culture is the process of cultivating good subjective judgements of this kind, to complement the mechanical and impersonal corpus of objective knowledge. "Love AND logic keep us clear..."