PHP is cheating! However, you may like this.

Actually, the Currency datatype provides a fixed decimal. It was removed in VB.NET for no clear reason, but provided a 64-bit value with a constant 4 base 10 digits in the fraction.

And I believe the official abbreviation is "PL/I". :)

I think that's sort of the appeal of combining COBOL and Java in one server product. Now, PHBs can use Java for record-oriented applications and COBOL for everything else. Prior to that, they'd have to pick one or the other.

How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter? The BASIC family is generally held to be pretty good in that department.

Oh, how I wish it were.

Can you believe these animals survived? Who knows what they'll try next, maybe a dog or chimp! One day, humans might even be able to go into space!

...and so the contest to find the worst combination of server software technologies begins. I'm stuck somewhere between unmaintained metamorphic perl and a ghetto re-implementation of Excel Services.

Biology is more of a day job. Computer history is one of my hobbies. That being said, though, biology does involve a lot of Java and XML.

Well now it'll live another one! Like the sporocarp of a fungus growing on a bag of rotting garbage.

Truly, there can be no greater evil than COBOL and enterprise Java in the same bucket, united by an unholy sludge of XML.

It did, much to my disappointment. All mentions of other methods of teaching are those that have been imported. There was something about Prince Charles visiting in 1988, but it was only for the sake of analogy, and the British schooling system is rather lackluster. In fact the vignette seemed rather pointlessly antagonistic, but perhaps there was context somewhere between what the chapter itself described and the events of April 19, 1775 that I missed.

And a helicopter! Surely that is equivalent somehow. Surely.

The sheer lengths of his tract and interview are impressive, and I am compelled by the numerous footnotes. Clearly, this is a work of profound augustness.

I do have a key objection, though, and perhaps you can lay it to rest—he doesn't seem to be in touch with modern practices in other countries; or at least I haven't noticed any mention of them in my cursory glances. Did you notice any?

I see you are skilled in the art of dad humour. It suits you, I think. To be honest.

That's pretty scary. I'm pretty sure we covered all of those in grade one, and it just so happens I was in grade one in 1995. The Ontario curriculum was a bit tougher, it seems.

Then again, asking an eleven-year-old to read and understand Thoreau or Shakespeare sounds like a classic Victorian misunderstanding of childhood development. Piaget may not be perfect (or up to date, for that matter), but educators believed some truly absurd things before then. Carroll was certainly a good pick, and a lot more accessible.

And... yeah, I think you know all the possible explanations for why the school system is broken already, so I won't bother rehashing old threads.

To be honest, I think perhaps the name comes across as a self-conscious conservative title, i.e. something you get called so often you adopted it as a moniker to pre-empt the insult. (Which, I guess, is the point.) But, hey, we all have lousy days. And weeks. And months. And years... I'm a little too young to be a life coach, but have you considered buying a really expensive car? That seems to be the standard solution to this kind of problem.

As for cells, the largest single-celled organism I know of off the top of my head is an ostrich or dinosaur egg (which doesn't really count since it's not fully alive for long, and generally holds something else), followed by the Mermaid's wineglass, a ridiculously large alga (up to 10 cm or about 4 inches.) There may be larger. In general, large single-cell organisms are unpopular because they provide a single point of failure and can't specialize, meaning they have to do everything at once, which gets cluttered. It's a little like running a mainframe with no service contract.

I think the most exciting thing about the Michigan Militia is the faint implication that Ontario might invade at any moment. It is sad that their website does not mention this. Oh, what could have been.

That one is a little less impressive, but kudos for investing the time and energy. It's creative in its own way.