I meant to say java io is not particularly hard to use. I personally find nio harder to use. Does anyone know how to disable the touch pad on a Sony VIAO running Ubuntu? Just disabling the device from System->Preferences doesn't seem to work.

Except NIO is usually not as straight forward as java io. It isn't particular hard to use either if you learn to use threads to handle the I/O and pass information through queues.

No. For you it occurs tomorrow. Relativity is awesome.

A 5.25" drive would have significantly higher stresses placed upon the platter. There would also be more area to have to physically move the head across.

Except that when going to a NTSC television, the full quality of a DVD can never be realized. Thus they ended up nearly the same effectiveness. It was much better then VHS, however.

I attempted to move to ATSC DTV back in May. I used to get some stations perfectly clear all the time, and others might have some loss of sharpness or echoes but still had perfect audio and were always watchable. If I took the time to tune the antennae I could get almost all of them in clear with no loss. Since installing my converter box, television has become useless to me. Even the strongest channels result in corruption, screen blanking, and even worse complete loss of audio. Thus, I effectively am now unable to watch TV without becoming seriously annoyed. I currently live in an apartment, so I am unable to install an outdoor yagi style antenna. Although, judging from my parents who live closer to their transmitter and have a nice yagi antenna it won't help in poor weather as they still get drop outs. The antennae I currently use is indoor amplified VHF/UHF combo. Yes I could get cable. However, I should not have to pay for cable. Television has an official designation of it is to inform the public. Fundamentally, going with cable would mean I'm being charged for something that I should be free (and did in the past). Furthermore, 99% of the cable systems I've seen have poorer analog quality then I used to get with my antenna. My parents would get pictures that rival the best of DVD's or digital cable. Hurricane Katrina also taught me, that you can still get a lot of information from a signal that is extremely snowy since the images are still discernible and the audio clear enough. Since we were staying in a rural area, I can only imagine that many of these people would not be able to receive any information other then by AM/FM radio in the future. As far as I'm concerned, we are getting an inferior technology forced upon us. The standard should have allowed signals to be viewable for longer ranges and with no loss in audio (or at least degraded audio). Also, don't tell me their is the internet and newspaper. I have both. In fact, I'm also a licensed HAM. There are some things that TV is extremely good at, that no other technology comes close. Think of the recent question posed about the inauguration of President Obama.

I should mention anyone who is trying to peddle python against java against c are all barking up the wrong tree. Those are really all the same class of languages and offer no benefits over the other in terms of good practice, smart thinking, and great design.

Procedural is most like instruction list people are used to doing. However, it often leads to bad practices and sloppy coding. Object oriented can be good, but few people use object oriented beyond procedural wrapped in a class. It also is often hard to represent a good object system on paper. Functional languages to vary degrees are very nice if you didn't learn procedural before hand and can think of problems as smaller problems. People usually have trouble with them because they have learned Basic, C, etc. Logic languages are extremely powerful in that you only describe what you want, not how it should go about being computed. That isn't quite true, but think of them as more of set theory and logic. However, they can be somewhat awkward to teach.