but, considering this is a class to expand people's experience with computing systems, the goal is not necessarily to lure her into switching to using a different OS. The goal is education, not marketing.

Ah, yes, in funding Catholic parishes to care for children in utter safety, the Salvation Army to provide equally for straight people and GLBT people, and for missionary organizations to civilize the heathen hordes. Right. Based on your sig, you're none too enthusiastic about religious causes, but the vast majority of social charities are mainly fronts for religious organizations to evangelize and push their own social agenda . Government-run social programs at least have some semblance of accountability to society at large. At the very least, your response merits a big fat [citation needed]

what are you talking about

Here's a tip for "clean code" you might appreciate: </quote>

What!? They raised taxes to pay for waging war!? That's no way to run a country! Those socialists need to learn something about fiscal responsibility! If people start having to pay higher taxes for war, they might stop supporting it! </sarcasm>

Um, over a billion people can write them in... wait for it... China! Yes, they do have computers there, and yes, they do type and read Chinese characters with them.

i more or less assume that that's what all "shortened" links are ;)

obligatory SMBC.

maybe, once you know the form of your function. But it takes at least basic knowledge of calculus to e.g. know why and how conjugate priors can make Bayesian methods easier

So, um, how do you think we write computer programs that deal with the uncertainty involved in robotics, speech recognition, video processing, and OCR? The most successful approaches involve optimizing various objective functions with respect to (possibly labeled) data, which almost always involves either climbing (or descending) a gradient to some optimum, or (in Bayesian approaches) integrating out certain parameters. How are you going to do these things without calculus? Your professors were trying to give you the foundation to do these cool things.

here you go. Try typing "ls -" then push tab twice. magic!

wow, emacs haters are out in force today...

I'm not a lawyer, but if we're just talking about what the word "rape" means in English, then you're absolutely right that it does have a specific definition: non-consensual sexual contact. It doesn't have to be a stranger jumping out of a bush for it to be rape. It doesn't have to involve a knife or a gun or a fist to be rape. If an individual says she (or he) is not ok with any kind of sexual activity, including sex without a condom, and you proceed to engage in that activity (by force or deceit or whatever), then it is rape.

By arguing that only some kinds of non-consensual sexual activity count as rape, you're contributing to a culture that turns a blind eye to the kind of rape (non-stranger, little or no physical force involved, etc.) that is most common. This gives rapists cover from their peer group and license to think that what they do is not really rape; David Lisak, for example, has built a research career out of interviewing rapists, and 6% of men will self-report as rapists as long as the word "rape" is not used. Please stop.

um, no. 0.333... is the decimal expansion of 1/3. It just has a clumsy decimal (base-10) expansion. The ternary (base 3) expansion is quite simple: 0.1.

Here is your Useless Use of Cat Award ;)