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Submission + - Girls 'better than boys at making computer games', study finds. 1

Esteanil writes: Researchers in the University of Sussex's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language.
The young people, aged 12-13, spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role-playing games. The girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding. The girls used seven different triggers – almost twice as many as the boys – and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses. Boys nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.

Comment Re:You should learn both of them (Score 0) 211

Well, Perl is just another frontend to C, so knowing C makes you a better Perl programmer!
Sorry, why do people write nonsense like this?
Since when is programming language A a frontend to another language B?

The rest of your post implies you have no clue about the difference of a language bersus the object code produced with it ...

Comment Re:1 vote for objective-C (Score 1) 211

That is the biggest nonsense about programming languages I ever heared.
Objective C is unreadable bitch just like Perl or IBM/JCL.
To learn Objective C if you can do the same thing either with C or C++ or, that was the parents question: with Swift, is pure masochism!
Sorry, but who in his sane mind would learn Objective C? Did you even ever try to read a page of code written in that language?

Bottom line I don't get that fear about APIs repeated here on /. all the time. WTF, there are modern IDEs out there. The last time I 'learned' an API is 20 - 30 years ago. In our times you use a class and the IDE tells you all about it.

Comment Re:You're Never an Idiot (Score 0) 211

Since all the pretend "medicines" are 1) diluted beyond the point of having any trace of anything, you just fill a bunch of different jars with 2) tap water and practice your mumbo-jumbo speeches
1) That is wrong. Most of the homeopathic medicines are not diluted at all, the majority of the rest is diluted quite sanely and there is plenty of the original stuff in it. Furthermore, it is not a medicine. Perhaps you should read up the basics about how homeopathy is 'supposed to work'.
2) That would be fraud ... good luck with that.

Math

New Analysis Pushes Back Possible Origin For Antikythera Mechanism 62

We've mentioned several times over the years the Antikythera Mechanism, the astounding early analog computer recovered from a Greek shipwreck in shape good enough to allow modern recreations. The device has been attributed to different Greek mathemeticians and thinkers, such as Archimedes, Hipparchus, and Posidonius, but as reader puddingebola writes, "Current research suggests its origin may be much earlier, and its working based on Babylonian arithmetical methods rather than Greek Trigonometry, which did not exist at the time. Puddingebola excerpts from the NYT article: Writing this month in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Dr. Carman and Dr. Evans took a different tack. Starting with the ways the device's eclipse patterns fit Babylonian eclipse records, the two scientists used a process of elimination to reach a conclusion that the "epoch date," or starting point, of the Antikythera Mechanism's calendar was 50 years to a century earlier than had been generally believed.

Submission + - Taxi Medallion Prices Plummet Under Pressure From Uber

HughPickens.com writes: Most major American cities have long used a system to limit the number of operating taxicabs, typically a medallion system: Drivers must own or rent a medallion to operate a taxi, and the city issues a fixed number of them. Now Josh Barro reports at the NYT that in major cities throughout the United States, taxi medallion prices are tumbling as taxis face competition from car-service apps like Uber and Lyft. The average price of an individual New York City taxi medallion fell to $872,000 in October, down 17 percent from a peak reached in the spring of 2013, according to an analysis of sales data. "I’m already at peace with the idea that I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Larry Ionescu, who owns 98 Chicago taxi medallions. As recently as April, Boston taxi medallions were selling for $700,000. The last sale, in October, was for $561,000. “Right now Uber has a strong presence here in Boston, and that’s having a dramatic impact on the taxi industry and the medallion values,” says Donna Blythe-Shaw, a spokeswoman for the Boston Taxi Drivers’ Association. “We hear that there’s a couple of medallion owners that have offered to sell at 425 and nobody’s touched them."

The current structure of the American taxi industry began in New York City when “taxi medallions” were introduced in the 1930s. Taxis were extremely popular in the city, and the government realized they needed to make sure drivers weren’t psychopaths luring victims into their cars. So, New York City required cabbies to apply for a taxi medallion license. Given the technology available in the 1930s, It was a reasonable solution to the taxi safety problem, and other cities soon followed suit. But their scarcity has made taxi medallions the best investment in America for years. Where they exist, taxi medallions have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009. The medallion stakeholders are many and deep pockets run this market. The system in Chicago and elsewhere is dominated by large investors who rely on brokers to sell medallions, specialty banks to finance them and middle men to manage and lease them to drivers who own nothing at all. Together, they’re fighting to protect an asset that was worth about $2.4 billion in Chicago last year. “The medallion owners seem to be of the opinion that they are entitled to indefinite appreciation of their asset,” says Corey Owens, Uber’s head of global public policy.. “The taxi medallion in the U.S. was the best investment you could have made in the last 30 years. Will it go up forever? No. And if they expected that it would, that was their mistake.”

Comment Re:Yeah, 80%--I call BS (Score 1) 395

I have lived in communities that required vehicles to be inspected for their emissions. If you car failed, the car had to be "repaired" before the owner could get a current car tag. The car repair hit "a lot of people that cannot afford to retrofit or replace vehicles" hard. Car inspection is on the decline because it creates an intense dislike among those voters whose cars are inspected on a yearly basis.

But the standard is only to the level it was when the car was manufactured. The standard is not raised beyond that.

Owning a car costs money even when it's paid-off. I know, I used to drive nothing but beaters as I was poor, and I did have to contend with cars that failed emissions. Thing of it is, fixing the car once a year cost about the same as a single car payment would have, so it was not too much of a burden to handle.

Comment Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? (Score 1) 215

Sorry, forgot to mention it was on Linux 1.2.x

Yes, back in those days I also had a 386, although mine had 8MB RAM. I could therefore get away with only using 8MB of my 120MB ATA disk for swap. Today, I use 0MB of my 160GB SATA SSD, and also 0MB of the 320GB ATA that I use for my /opt.

Comment Re:Why (Score 1) 395

Lol, ummm NO! The Euro market has been waay ahead of the US in this area for awhile. Hell they couldn't bring over their diesels for the longest time because our fuel was too shitty to run them!

NO! They were way ahead of us for awhile. But now they're way behind, because we've mandated low-sulfur diesel and they haven't, at least not all of them.

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