This is sort of how I learned. I was 8 years old when somebody showed me qBasic on the family's 386. It changed my world. My first three years of programming were animated ASCII stick figures, simple story games ("You see a spaceship. Do you want to use missiles or lasers?"), and very basic graphics (like string art using line functions). I had a tacit sense of many programming concepts before I was able to define them.

When I got to traditional computer science courses in college, I realized that they're typically taught the other way around: here's a definition, THEN here are some examples and related puzzles. That's a great format for an academic paper, but it's not exactly "joy of learning" material.

Actually, per capita deaths by war were far less in the past ten years than in quite possibly all of recorded history.

There is no question among people in education that inspiring students leads to better outcomes. But as an administrator or policy maker, what strategies would you (or rather, could you) implement to cause more inspiration?

The same insanity that allows SAP to prosper while creating terrible software: enterprise contracts.

We all use technology to replace bodily functions. For over twelve thousand years, we have been using cooking technology to replace the work our digestive systems previously had to do. We use clothing technology to replace the work our fur once did. We used art and writing, then the printing press, then the copy machine, and now computers to replace much of the work our brains once did.

Think about how you feel when you step into your car and turn on the ignition -- the car suddenly becomes part of you. If another car collides with yours, you say, "They hit me" and not "They hit my car." And now, with phones connecting to the Internet and identity becoming so important online, I certainly feel like I've lost a part of myself when someone else is playing with my phone, as if they tore out one of my limbs to do a puppet show.

On the contrary, taking sides is exactly what the Op/Ed section of the paper is for.

Human *language* is inefficient, indirect, and generally lacks precision when used. Human *voice*, however, contains an amazing smorgasbord of information that you process in far more ways than you may be aware of. Every subconscious adjustment in pitch, timbre, and rhythm lets us communicate our feelings about the situation at hand without having to pick the perfect word. It's just there. We are still "discovering" all the meanings that we otherwise automatically interpret from these voices.

Whoa, pause! If a food is "Any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body," are you sure sugar is food? 0-calorie sugar substitutes are consumed for the same reason sugar is often consumed: to enjoy a pleasant sensation in your mouth. Sure, sugar is not a drug, but maybe we need a new term or category to describe something we consume solely for pleasure, but isn't a drug.

This. Many school districts actually refuse to collect social security numbers, and even those that do often will refuse to report them to state reporting systems for fear of mis-handling data.

You can hear it from 80 miles away, though you can't see much detail. You might get a pretty good vantage from Titusville or the other suburb-y places near the space center. There's lots of beach-front on the Indialantic within five miles of the launchpad.

Do it! I once lived 80 miles south of the Space Center and the launches were still huge events there. Everyone in the neighborhood would wander out to their driveways (but not the lawns, damn fire ants!) to watch that stream of fire streak through the sky.

The United States was the first country to recognize the state of Israel. Israel has also been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since the 1970s; most of that aid is military. While US support of Israel wavered a little in the 1950s, I feel that "undying" would still be an accurate term for the overall history of these two nations' relations. The US has been afraid since the get-go of getting involved in this ridiculous ethnic conflict, but the average American's friend-or-foe meter has always been more likely to read "friend" with Israel than with the rest of the Middle East.

I love the irony that this post is modded up. Slashdot's karma system feels just as much like a game to me as any multiplayer game with achievements and points.

Plus, people have developed the world-inside-a-computer theme in fiction so much since those days. Cyrstal Nights by Greg Egan comes to mind as a story that could totally blow people's minds on the big screen.

That was just happened to me, and exactly what I did (or rather, DIDN'T do). I still beat myself up for this - by reporting this kind of irresponsibility, we could have made the roads that much safer.