Thanks for your reasoned and sensible answers, really good insights. I appreciate your time in giving me some perspectives I'd not considered.

Not something you hear on slashdot every day :-)

why would providers go from IPv4 to IPv6 when soon there will be a shortage of numbers

They'll drag their feet but, eventually, there will be services that people want to use that are only available via IPv6 and then there will be little choice. (Although they'll try to proxy[1] popular IPv6 sites first)

[1] fake 10.x.x.x dns records that they serve to their customers and then forward the traffic over IPv6

Not a flamebait question/troll even though it might seem so!

This article does indeed show how folk can be creative under a restrictive government: the Cuban authorities don't look like the victim when they are not allowing their own citizens access to the internet (anybody know what their justification is - I'd be interested to know the official reasoning).

But on the other side and in a more general sense, can somebody tell me why the USA still has an embargo against Cuba? (sensible answers only please). It's really perplexing for an outsider so reasonable answers would be welcomed. The USA doesn't have a problem with quite open trade and relations with other nominally communist states (e.g. China, Vietnam). It doesn't mind trading with other countries it was at war with 50 years ago. It doesn't mind trading with countries who had /still have nuclear missiles pointing at it. It doesn't mind embracing countries with poor human rights records.

Is it because of the proximity of Cuba, or some other reason? Really curious, feels like an odd hang over from a cold war that finished before many slashdotters were born...

cheers!

If I can take one thing away from what's being said without managing to actually get to the point it's that apparently what we really need is to do a better job of teaching mathematics.

I mean, that's really what it all comes down to.

Programming is ultimately just an application of that. The reasons for needing to teach it universally ultimately seem to fall back to the simple fact that current methods of, and the areas of mathematics teaching are currently failing kids.

So rather than recognising that giving students a book with 40 math problems to shut up and solve in silence which is far too prevalent still it seems what we really need is to give them real world problems to solve and explain how to use mathematical underpinnings of modelling, logic, and philosophy to achieve that.

Unfortunately the people coming up with these ideas of coding for all themselves never managed to self-educate in mathematics to see past the flawed system of teaching it upto the age of about 18 and don't realise that's what they're basically asking for.

Teach kids a broader understanding of mathematics than just how to repeat algorithms blindly without truly understanding the what's, why's, or how's and everything from making a logical argument in politics through to doing programming will come easily.

Keep teaching maths in the shoddy way it's often currently taught though and it wont matter how much half-arsed coding you've taught, you still wont have gotten anywhere.

Frankly even history as a subject could be made far more useful if kids had to do a module on the history of mathematics and the evolution of mathematical achievements - you don't even need to cover the math itself, just explaining who came up with what, and why is an eye opener in itself and ties in with some important advances in human philosophy, physics and other key milestones of humanity too.

Then you made one of the mistakes mentioned above.

In 2011 that was about $800,000USD lol. Now with the drop in value of the Euro, it's not so much. I guess Europeans don't save for their retirement like we do in the US.

Agreed, but it's worth noting that they're very US-centric (and that's not a criticism, just a statement of fact) so if you're not from the US you may find your money better spent elsewhere.

For example, in the UK, the Open Rights Group is far more relevant and helpful towards dealing with these issues in the UK than the EFF is. Presumably the options in countries like Sweden and Germany would be the much better organised respect Pirate parties there.

That's not happening now. Right now everyone is getting richer.

If you find someone who says otherwise, dig into their numbers, because they have some mistake. Either they didn't take into account inflation, or they compare wealth and income inappropriately, or they don't consider total compensation, or they don't consider the payments we are making from the rich to the poor in the form of welfare.

Those people probably made the 'mistake' on purpose, because their goal is to manipulate you into pulling out a pitchfork.

Then you are probably young. As you approach retirement, more of your friends will be approaching that net worth, because they've been saving for a long time.

I don't know, the definition I've heard that I think covers every OOP ideology is, "the functions get passed around with the data."

Yeah, this is sad, and your last sentence true.

Why is it too late? Are you almost dead?

For real-time rendering of a simulated environment - that is, gaming - textures are generally stored as mipmaps so the more pixels it's going to take up on the screen, the more detailed version of the texture is used and thus the memory use rises accordingly through the entire pipeline. It's pretty easy to see if you keep resolution or texture quality constant and vary the other. If you're doing some other kind of simulation that might not hold, but for gaming what you said is pretty much false.

Inequality is not a good reason to pick up a pitchfork. There are causes I will die for, but that is not one of them.

And not many other people are willing to die for that either, which is why people like you are safe at home behind your computer complaining about inequality, rather than out wielding a pitchfork somewhere.