Really? I think it's most inappropriate for an education setting.

A good question. I think for most people, it's just a waste of time.

That one is actually relevant to politics, so they can perhaps make better decisions about what powers the government should have and what powers it shouldn't. That's what I'd like to say, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Beyond the most simple math? I have no idea. We don't even teach it well enough for people to even begin to truly comprehend it, so I don't know why we bother at this point.

HyperTalk was oddball, but HyperCard was a decent way to get a non-technical user to be able to present data in a usable form, then expand from there.

I could easily do similar with a Web page and some backend scripting, but there was something fairly nice about HyperCard's instant gratification where once the script was in, it was ready to go. No makefiles, no compilation, the source was the object code.

I would not be surprised if we saw a modern version of Hypercard come around again, because done right, it would function both offline, online, and perhaps even partially online where frequently used cards would be cached.

When I was running through CS (graduated in 2008), the students knew they would have to fight tooth and nail for positions. They had to be better than the offshore coding houses, and/or the H-1Bs.

So, a lot of them not just did well in class, but went off on internships, both paid and unpaid, as well as went and got their name on some OSS project.

The people that went through CS were the die-hards... there were no illusions about getting some cushy ABAP job. Instead the students focused on trying to actually be usable pieces in a dev team puzzle. The people who were not that dedicated switched their majors to general business.

On Windows, I usually use one Web browser in a VM, sandboxed, or both for general browsing. For banking, and other sensitive services, I fire up a different Web browser in a different VM/sandbox. This way, it provides some isolation. It isn't a complete solution, but so far, has worked pretty well, especially with all the Web browsers having ad-blocking extensions built in.

If one does sandbox, have the data stored on a different volume. This way, if some rogue program tries creating a loop or filling the filesystem with junk files, the sandbox can be killed, the filesystem reformatted, and things restarted.

For the simple reason that nobody has made "science for fun" profitable anymore. Remember: monopolistic corporations would rather pay to maintain the status quo.

Well, we don't know that Mr. Fusion was available in 2015. Doc Brown might have traveled further into the future, after all.

Having once written for HyperCard, I'm glad it's gone. It had some syntax in common with COBOL. ADD 1 TO N is valid COBOL and valid HyperTalk. The data access in Hypercard (put the second word of name into last_names) was worse than COBOL.

If you used card names instead of card numbers, the program ran much slower.

And then you sue and the judge rules that unconscionable and awards you a refund. Meanwhile he's pissed off at the shop and looks for an excuse to award damages.

Contracts can't just make any arbitrary thing binding.

Do I actually need to state that institutions are made up of individuals?

Correct, and it's those individuals that either care or don't care. Institutions do not care. They do not have memories. They do not have souls.

It's a minor point, but I object to giving these entities, made up of humans, specifically human qualities in themselves.

I can point to many instances where giving such entities (corporations, institutions, governments) human characteristics has led us to no good, and can find no instances where it has been beneficial. You want to say the president of a university cares, or the CEO of a corporation cares, then fine. But don't tell me that it's the university or corporation that does the caring.

Words have meaning.

I'd say eBay it, buy a Nexus 7/10, and explain it like this: "It's like buying an Xbox game for someone who has a Wii." Or if they're too old to know game consoles, they might be familiar with a past format war: "It's like buying a Beta tape for someone who has a VHS deck."

Saruman, Saruman, does whatever a Saru can, but how will that be enough?

So did the writing reform that came out of Beleriand, where vowels were promoted from tehtar (points) to full letters. Remember Durin's gate on the west side of Moria, noted for the weak default password that Narvi set and Celebrimbor leaked? The inscription on that was written with vowels as letters.

There's no escaping shades of reality in any SF/Fantasy I've ever read. Scratch at any of them, and huge problems are revealed.

McCaffrey's dragons are too powerful. Large size, flying, and fire breathing is pretty stock stuff for dragons. But her dragons are also telepathic, and so emo they each bond with a chosen human rider so closely they kill themselves if their rider dies, and they can teleport (mere flying just ain't good enough), and worst of all, time travel. I'm guessing she realized she'd gone too far, but couldn't make any acknowledgment. Instead, she tried to paper over the problems by introducing restrictions and limitations that unfortunately come across as too arbitrary.

An integral and needless law of Tolkien's world serves only to make things needlessly more special and their loss more tragic. It's this notion that great things can only be done once. Why can't Yavanna simply grow more trees to light the world? Why did she quit at 2 trees to start with? Why can't Feanor make more Silmarillions? No explanation is offered, we're simply told that's the way things are. There's enough real misery in the world, there's no need to invent reasons to be even more miserable. But some people, especially story tellers, do that to be more dramatic, more poignant. This desire for specialness also infects authors' thinking on copyright. Even apart from the obvious self-interested reasons, they're predisposed to like copyright, like the way it puts art on a pedestal.

Another problem with many fantasy stories is what I call the Godzilla or King Kong problem. Huge scary powerful solo monsters that no one expected certainly are dramatic. But improbable. Monster movies are inherently ridiculous because even if such a monster appeared, it would have no chance whatsoever of doing much damage before the massed might of millions of people brought it down. The Watcher in the Water at the west entrance to Moria would in all likelihood starve very quickly. One need only wait. If, somehow, the monster is magically sustained, there are all sorts of other things a crew of engineering sorts like dwarves could do to solve the problem it created. For one, could open another exit nearby, but out of its quite limited reach. Or, could probably set off a rock avalanche, crushing anything in the pool as well as displacing all the water with debris. Could also undermine the dam and drain the pool that way. Or perhaps a more low key approach might work, like dumping poison in the pool. To prevail against all the things a crew of determined engineers could try, the monster would need extraordinary abilities by the dozen. Even the Balrog should have a very difficult time prevailing against an entire nation of dwarves. The Balrog only ran them out of Moria. The sandworms of Dune are slightly more plausible, but still not a real problem for a civilization that can travel interplanetary space. Only Sauron went as far as setting up a rival empire, and thereby stood a real chance of prevailing.

Middle Earth follows many rules of nature. The land is for the most part geologically plausible and sound, with mountains in ranges, rivers rising in the mountains and flowing downhill to the oceans, and woods, marshes, grasslands, deserts and ice in places one might expect. Despite the prominent place of magic in the typical fantasy story, its impact is really quite limited. Gandalf used his brains as much or more than his wizardry. Since the land is familiar to so many readers, why not model its climate for fun?

The cited article is interesting, but he never gets into Bitcoin's "contract" capabiilty. There have been proposals to add mechanisms to Bitcoin so that you could send Bitcoins to someone, but they couldn't spend them until the sender committed the transaction. This provides a way to insure you get the goods when you order something.

So far, that's a future feature, not a usable one. This is why Bitcoin remains the scammer's paradise - anonymous, irrevocable remote money transfer. There's little risk of annoying lawsuits, cops, or armies of angry customers with pitchforks coming after you.

As a result, more than half of Bitcoin "exchanges" have gone under, usually taking customer funds with them.