I've always thought the 'Gingers have no souls' bit was invented totally by Matt Stone, a Jewish/Irish/American ginger, for 'South Park' as a 'take that' for Jewish critics of the show who describe him as a 'Self-hating Jew'.

I've always thought that Ginger skin-tone and hair coloration was very attractive on women. I've not heard a lot of disrespect for Gingers before the South Park episode, and then it's been entirely tongue-in-cheek.

- Appreciating data-types, their limitations and the perils of using casting them incorrectly helped me a lot in understanding about things I need to be careful about

This is a fairly serious issue, but one that can be brought up after the basics of computer programming have been instilled. Most languages are either loosely typed, duck-typed, or have robust conversion features these days. Kids who learn to mangle a string in Javascript will pick up quickly on 'You have to use a 'to_str' method in some other languages'.

The place where this will really catch them is math... but again there are robust solutions in almost all languages.

- Are they going skip the concept of Pointers ? It's not wise to use them unless necessary but to be aware of the concept was very rewarding for me

Pointers in anything other than the very lowest-level-touching-the-metal code are an abomination. They cause far more confusion and grief than they ever help. Yes, there are situations in which the best way to address a problem is to pass a pointer around. However, in this day and age of multi-gigabyte ram sticks, I'd rather bloat up a program's ram usage with maybe unnecessary copies of large objects than dick around with pointers.

- How will they teach multi-threaded programming? We're not quite there yet in JS.

Threading and thread safety are not really beginner concepts, nor are they really required for the majority of code work in the real world.

However, JS approaches the issue obliquely by being bolted onto the threading model of the underlying interpreter. In a browser, which is probably what most of these kids will be learning on, you have to worry about concurrency of the browser instance. If I run a script in this named window, is it going to affect anything in that named window? No, that's not really threading, but it's the same mental concept.

Likewise, beginners are not going to be writing their own output handlers, which is the obvious usage for threading. The advanced ones are going to be playing with painting on HTML5 canvas elements while maybe playing sounds at the same time. They'll be using the browser's already threaded output for those functions.

The MOR for TSG shows total assets as $0 (yes, that's "zero"), down from $1,326,293 on petition date, and total liabilities of $1,119,238, up from $418,965 on petition date. The MOR for TSG Operations shows total assets as $1,515,129, down from $15,493,080 on petition date, and total liabilities of $9,739,295, up from $4,311,640 on petition date. Go SCO! It was not bankrupt when it entered bankruptcy protection, but it surely is now.

Total assets: $1,515,129. Total Debt: $10,858,533

Hmm... SCO's in a world of hurt. I'm trying to figure out how they can even get lawyers to work with them at this point, unless they're using a 'We don't get paid unless you get paid!' ambulance chaser-type personal liability attorney.

Hey, IBM. That's a total of $12,373,662. According to your 2010 income report, it looks like you're making a net of about 14 billion dollars a year... literally more than a thousand times that. And I'm thinking that at least some of that $10.9m is owed to you. If you guys negotiate a bit with the other creditors, I'm betting you could simply up and purchase all SCO's assets for about $2-4m.

That's lunch money for a company like IBM. It's less than a certain Kickstart project we've all been reading about.

Think about the good will you could create by taking a dump truck to what's left of SCO and then public-domaining the entire shebang.

And while all this fear mongering, submission to armed authority, 'convenience arrests', and security theater is happening, thousands of Americans will be singing

"mumble mumble mumble something something Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!"

*shakes head sadly*

Yeah. Enjoy the game. Really. There's not a lot else left now, is there?

Phil,

I was recently reading through some of the '2012 hysteria' on your site and your affiliates... mostly responses to uneducated or superstitious people who've bought into the 'The End is Nigh' madness.

Since I grew up in a similar environment, I've also been watching the apocalyptic religious fervor surrounding people like Harold Camping with some horror.

My understanding is that this kind of thing tends to peak near century markers... 'End of the Century == End of the World', so theoretically, the silliness should be tapering off. Right?

What is your experience on this? Are we seeing a slowdown to the 'End of World' craziness, or is it going to get worse?

Yeah, Sony earned my ongoing boycott well before the 'Other OS' fiasco. I've refused to buy Sony anything since the rootkit'd CDs incident. I haven't regretted my decision once.

I even try to avoid purchasing anything that pays a license to Sony. That's more difficult, but doable if you do the research.

1. Pick a substance that can be shipped to space fairly gracefully in large, thin, flexible sheets. You'd need BIG sheets. This can either be something that is already adhesive or can be activated or coated with adhesive in orbit. Either way, it should be cheap and disposable. The edges of this material should be fairly durable so that if it tears, the torn bits will hang on to the edges. High relative-velocity impacts should either go right through the material or stick to it.

2. Attach a small, single-use, steerable rocket to one corner of each sheet. These need not be designed to stand the test of time but should be durable enough not to break apart on use.

3. Ship many of these to a 'messy' orbit as cheaply as possible. Deploy, unfold, and activate the adhesive as necessary, preferably without any kind of human-aided EVA. Ideally this should be done with the cheapest, lightest of rockets, and activation and unfolding is something that should happen entirely electronically.

4. Let these orbit a few times, sweeping up crap. Monitor from the ground via telescope.

5. Activate the single-use rocket remotely to nudge the whole mess into reentry.

6. Repeat as necessary to clean the orbit.

Really not what the original article says - have you read it?

From TFA:

In fact, Burt says that the Banshee team had unanimously opted to turn off the Amazon store when given the choice, but now "Canonical came up with their own plan: essentially the option we rejected."

Further, Burt doesn't seem pleased with the way Canonical has handled the situation. "Canonical offering us options and then going back on them when we didn't pick their preferred one was not reasonable." Lorentz says he agrees "wholeheartedly" with Burt's response.

Some who commented on the original report suggested that the Banshee team had made a mistake in choosing to turn off the store rather than taking the 25% cut. Burt says, "it is possible that GNOME will do better financially with this arrangement than if Canonical disabled the Amazon store. GNOME would do 4x better than that if our upstream code shipped unmodified, as it does in other Linux distributions.