I'm thinking of getting a domain with GD just so I can dump them too ;-)

Yes, it's much better to work in the private sector where things are booming...

I can sell you a Babelfish if you'd like. It's not like those goddam Limeys don't not speak proper English nohow.

archive.org seems to have a reasonable selection of this kind of stuff. There's some surprisingly good movies there (some dross too but that's the same for the new market).

Of course they are only up for disproving 'sexy' missions! It's only the *really* cool stuff that sells books / gets the public to give them attention etc.

I'm showing my age here, but I took an O level in Computer Science in 1985.

However, in school, we were taught by a former programmer and we had to learn two languages: one a low-level teaching language called CECIL (sp?) which was more like a very basic cross between Assembler and C; and Basic. We also learned how to flowchart, test (input and expected output), and how a computer was constructed. This was long before the dominance of MS Office.

It's actually almost laughable to think how basic this education was, but every so often it amazes me that I was this lucky. Examples: like when people talk breathlessly about unit tests and how amazing it is for programmers to learn it - that seems obvious to me because I learned it at the start.

Flowcharting - very early UML. Yup, grok that totally and use it before I even think of sitting at a keyboard even with some basic scripts.

Not relying on one language - hehehe, got that too because we weren't taught one language as the be all and end all.

The funny thing is that I'm not a programmer. I'm a designer - but I can program well enough (statistical algorithms mostly but also text processing, NLP and web stuff). And my education helps me to avoid typical pitfalls that seem to happen often (failing to plan tests, relying on a single language, failing to plan a program at all). I sound really smug about all this but it's saved me bags of wasted effort.

Ada was for business programming? From what I recall, it was commissioned by the DoD for critical applications like avionics systems - very different to COBOL's market. It's been used in business since but that wasn't it's intended purpose.

...which should raise the mean IQ of both deniers and everyone else....

I just read the article. It's actually about predicting sun-spots with artificial intelligence; but hey, this is /. where summaries are, well, a little different.

For most slashdotters, a life without sex is pretty much situation normal.

Except when dealing with synonyms. A page which uses only the word 'cars' to refer to cars will not be matched to a page that only uses the word 'automobiles' to refer to cars with keyword search. I'm not saying FB does this but synonymy is a well known problem (with solutions) in information retrieval.

Quoth: "They are more like script kiddies, playing with buzzwords they do not understand, not even realizing how ridiculous they look. They wield potentially very destructive tools without understanding the consequences."

So the US is governed by a 'respectable' version of Anonymous?

Now I think of it, the whole situation begins to make a lot of sense....

Absolutely - there is no conception whatsoever of a private healthcare system in the United Kingdom. If you read about BUPA, ignore it because it's a figment of your imagination. No, not here, not such thing as private healthcare. It's far worse to be at the mercy of a bureaucracy that has the aim of providing healthcare to those who need it than at the mercy of an insurance system designed to maximise profits (i.e., pay out for healthcare as little as possible).

You know how the saying is misquoted: "Those that can, do. Those that can't, recruit."