And this is why everyone should drop Linux and move to a system that is truly free. The GPL is forced freedom, which is no freedom at all.

I don't think site words or pictures or whole word is a good approach.

Phonics is preferred and here is why:

1. You can learn to read almost anything with phonics. It solves the base case first.
2. Words are infinite (as you make new ones, add different endings, etc.) and you can't them all
3. Phonics only starts out slower, once you have read a word a certain number of times, you memorize the whole word anyway and get "whole word" for free.
4. Speed comes with speed practice, not with picture memorization

There are a handful of words that aren't spelled as they are pronounced. Only those should be memorized with "Whole word". And in fact, we should include the phonetic spelling of all words as a correct alternative: example: victuals is often spelled as vittles now and either are now accepted.

1. Teach phonics for grades K thru 3.
2. In each year have a list of top words that are NOT phonetic. Increase the words each year. Kingergarteners can learn that 'to' and 'too' and 'two' are all pronounced the same.
3. In 4th and 5th grades have a speed reading practise for reading 1 to 3 words quickly.
4. In 6th and 7th grade, teach kids speed reading by seeing the whole line at once.
5. In High School, have kids practices reading and comprehending two lines at the same time.

I learned on phonics. I was an avid but slow reader. I took a one hour speed reading course and doubled my reading speed. If I could double my reading speed in one hour, how many other kids could? I ended up taking three 1 hour speed reading sessions. What if I had been taught that a dozens time a year between 4th grade and highschool?

Phonics followed by speed reading courses is the way to go.

We don't need infinite resources. First, we really are not taking up that much space. Sure, if you are in New York, it feels like it. But then look at Utah, and the rest of the midwest, where we haven't even started to fill up space.

We haven't even taking simple actions.
1. Fill Death Valley with ocean water. Since it is below sea level, this will take 2 pipes (1 for ocean to inland sea, and one back so there is a constant flow), a bit of tunneling, and zero long term energy. That inland sea will increase precipitation through the midwest, which will increase snow in mountains, and snow pack, which will cool temperatures. Add in the dead sea, pipe water to and from it.
2. Desalinization is hardly a thing yet. We haven't really embraced desalinization. When Californinia starts to get 95% of its water needs from desalinization, then talk to me about over-utililizing resources.
3. Piping water all over like we pipe oil.
4. Replacing a desert with a forest. What would be the affect on the climate if we replace the Sahara with a forest? We can start with tinted glass domes 3-d printed with a glass 3-d printers, made from sand right there in the Sahara, powered by Solar, and then put in green houses. We could fit 10 billion people in the Sahara with green houses, and we are only 7 billion people today. So again, plenty of space. Then we can do the same to the Gobi.
5. The ocean. We haven't even scratched the surface of what we can do in the ocean. What if we focussed on planting, growing, and harvesting seaweed in the ocean. We could probably solve world hunger.
6. Undergound, we aren't really even trying to build underground cities. We could cut out cities inside mountains (as long as we don't wake a Balrog).

So even without infinite resource, we have plenty of resources. Plenty to do.

But if you stop to think about it, there *are* infinite resources available to us both on and around this earth.

Inifite size 1: You can always go smaller. We have harnessed the power of atoms, with Nuclear, and there is more to harness as we go smaller to quarks, and then infinitely smaller. As technology grows we will find infinte power from inifinitely smaller source.

Infinite direction 2: Space.
  Space 1: Next is power expansion. We have yet to harvest wireless power other than solar and a few other lab-only successes. Once we have wireless power, we can have solar panels in space, which is inifite in size, that sends that power to earth.
Note: also what if those Solar panels were between Earth and the Sun, so they provided a small measure of Shade? I call it the Umbrella project. I am going to write a sci-fi novel about it. Stay tuned.

Space 2: Mining. We have the Moon, Mars, Astroid belt. We haven't even started mining the astroid belt. We might find the ability to increase our atmosphere by mining astroids, espicially ones that are mostly frozen elements that make up our air.

Space 3: Human expansion: Lastly is expanding to live in other places than earth. We use the dome technology we have for populating the Sahara to populate the moon, Mars, etc. We could build space stations with plant life. Dirt and water from asteroids and solar and you have an infite firtile space station.

So don't tell me there are limits. Don't act like we need to cut the human popuplation growth. We don't.

Xamarin

I completed my Masters of Computer Science at age 42 just last year in 2018.

Of my 13 Masters of Computer Science courses, I would say that three of them had a lot of math.

1. Object Recognition: required Statistics I and Stasticis II as prereqs and was more Statistics theory than code.
2. A modern topics course in which we went over a lot of the Euler project problems and we did as much math as code with a focus on Algorithms.
3. The last was Geometrical Algorithms and I learned more about Geometry than I did in a regular geometry course.

So the fact that only 3 out of 13 CS Masters courses had enough math to consider them math courses suggests that some CS courses could count as math, but most should not.

I let those who got an undergrad in CS recently speak to undergrad courses.

However, as we are talking an intro to programming class for High School students, I am going to say no.

First, let's discuss how huge 400 million is. Second lets remember that just because a PC didn't ship, doesn't mean a PC isn't being used. Most PCs are lasting 8 years due to the death of the processor doubleing every two years. New PCs just aren't that much faster. I know multiple consumers (people) with 10+ year old PCs and they are still using them. Many enterprise companies have changed their desktop refresh to 5 years. So assuming 400 million this year, and include the past 5 years at the same quantity and 6 to 10 years at an increasingly diminished quantity and there are still 3 or 4 billion PCs in use.

Yes, there are a lot of consumer devices being replaced with tablets. But almost nobody has started word processing on tablets yet. Bluetooth keyboards are sold but rarely used. About the only complexy input on tablets is by artists drawing. There is simple input, such as vendors clicking buttons for your orders.

So if you are wondering if the PC market is still worth targeting. There are still 3 of 4 billion users. If you don't think that is a market worth targeting, I don't know what is.

This is good news for PluralSight. The more annoyed Lynda.com users are, the more likely it is they will seek out a competitor. I already pay for PluralSight as, for my needs, I see it as cheaper yet superior to Lynda.com.

That might have sounded like a commercial. I am not affiliated with PluralSight, though I want to create content for it someday, so forgive the commericial sounding post.

Warcraft. I watch it a lot. I want a sequel.

Look, it would take about six months of laying pipe and we could have a huge inland Sea, greater than the Great Salt Lake, in Death Valley as it is below Sea level. Gravity will do all the work to transfer the water.

We could also complete the Sahara sea project, which is the same principal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Ghobi desert is not below sea level at all. So it would need serious work.

But after creating these inland seas, we wouldn't see much water level change in the oceans right away. However, every year, these desert inlands seas will evaporate and rain/snow elsewhere. Over time, say fifty years, they will make a difference.

Also, since they will cause more rain and clouds in dry hot parts of the world, the world would technical cool some.

This solves or decreases two problems:
1. Illegal Immagration from Mexico decreases - It puts jobs in Mexico. A lot of them. Improves the Mexico economy. Because so many more jobs are in Mexico, and because the economy imrpoves, the number of illegal aliens decreases significantly. Now you don't need to build a wall between Mexico.
2. With less immigration, there are more jobs in the US, even though the Apple Jobs didn't come here, the result is actuall more jobs, because when you add a job in Mexico, you keep the entire family in Mexico, where, so you remove not just one illegal immigrant, but with families, there are two adults, and with children, that is a lot of future jobs that stay.

I can tell you are European. You think that transit succes in one of your Countries (which is is the size of one or two of our 50 states) is awesome. But if you look at 30+ nations in Europe, you are just as bad when lumped together as the US is when lumped together.

Transit in New York is quite good, despite the article's mentioning that its use isn't at its peak. Transit in the highly populated areas of the US is comparable to transit in Europe.

http://www.mylifeelsewhere.com...
http://www.mylifeelsewhere.com...
http://www.mylifeelsewhere.com...

Also, you have no idea what it is like to live in the Western United States, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Dakotas, Arizon, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas (which by itself is larger in land than any Western European country) etc...? All of these states are as big as your single counties. In these states, large areas of land are populated by people who live a mile or more between every house. Do you have any towns where there are only 2,000 people living in the town, yet the town looks like a far bigger town, almost a city, because there are 30,000 people who live in the surrounding thirty mile radius, highly spread out? Or if you have a couple of these towns, are the norm, not the exception?

I hear the same uneducated garbage about the british mailing system. You can send a letter anywhere in England and it will be there by the next morning. Why can't the US mailing system be just as good. Well, it is in highly populated areas the size of England, but we are about 50 times the size of England.

Too many poeple have an unhealthy sense of entitlement.
We also have too many people who claim to be victims and don't take personal responsibility.
If the job a perosn does is only worth $10 an hour, that person is only entitled to $10 an hour.
If that is the only job that person can get, the problem is likely that person and/or that person's life decisions.
There are exceptions to deal with. People with severe mental disabilities like Down Syndrome, etc.
But if you drink and do drugs till you are 40 and look around and say: I need a living wage, it just doesn't sit well.
When you drop out of high school, get no education, live in your parents' basement till your late thirties, then say: I need a living wage, it doesn't sit well.

But instead of taking responsibility for yourselves, blame the government and big organizations. Yet continue to spend your entire paycheck, zero savings or investing, on Beer and Amazon prime as you badmouth both on social media while drinking Beer and watching a movie.

Sure Amazon pays a lot of warehouse workers low wages. They also pay thousands of Software Developers very high wages, often over six figures.
If a subset of Amazon workers need better pay, they need to either get another job, which might require spending free time learning a new skill instead of watching Prime.

Work in an Amazon factory for low wages? Spend every lunch hour for four years learning software engineering, then move up in (or out of) the company.

Take responsibility for yourself. Sure there are times to strike. This isn't one of them.

I wrote an add-on to my companies product and got a bonus for it. A 300k customer changed their mind of switching to another vendor in large part due to this plugin.

I saved my company 180K by submitting a bug report to an open source project. Turns out they were going to buy software because 1 feature of an open source project didn't work. Since I submitted the bug with very easy to reproduce step-by-step instructions, the bug was confirmed in 1 day and fixed withint 30 days.

I saved my company 175k a year for replacing it with a internally built app. The app we bought was like buying an 18 wheeler to handle a 5 mile commute to work for 1. We couldn't edit it. We didn't use 95% of its features.

I increased quality of code among a team of developers that wasn't even my team. Since joining the department I share with them, their code has vastly improved.

I wrote a tool that saved one of our network IT teams three weeks of work. They use it once a year, every year.

Another tool I wrote replaced 2 heads. They were headcount that only makes 45k, but that means they have been saved 90k a year for the past few years.

I took a couple products that caused daily tickets and redesigned them so we never get tickets.

From the perspective of how much money I have made and have saved my company, I am vastly underpaid. However, I am happy with my salary and my company.

Actually the law can be ignored now. It is a first amendment breach and a huge one. You can hinder sales of firearms, but you can't hinder DIY guns.

This is going to become and afterthought soon. 3d Printers haven't made it big yet. They aren't in every home. Car parts aren't provided with a 3d printer yet, but all that will be soon. As soon as you can print high quality car, motorcycle, backhoe, tractor, diesel, 4-wheeler, or any other machinery parts, there really is nothing preventing guns from being printed.

Even if there is an attempt to prevent printing, there will be firmware that ignores it.

Legislating this is a waste of time and money.

It has to have a plan to be good enough to replace Notepad++ or it is a waste of time.