I agree completely, glad to see a voice of reason in here. Submitter sounds a bit too eager to turn his brother into his little nerd minion. Kid is 12 and submitter is already dragging him into the c++ uber alles wars. It's not about this vs that language or platform or what *submitter* considers the One True Path. Just give him something where he can see results.

The first things I played with were Logo and Hypercard, which I think used a variant of AppleScript. Neither is at all relevant to the real world, but they were good starting points. No fancy editors or tool chains, just a little coding for quick results. The only special feature I'd consider useful is syntax highlighting to help them spot mistakes. He's not going to be creating big enough programs that he'll need anything else, and he certainly doesn't need to be bogged down learning obscure vi or emacs commands or complex tool chains. At most an editor like jEdit or Notepad++ would be just right, probably with a lot of features disabled or just ignored.

Next steps were javascript (again quick results) and programming my TI-82 (first programs that were actually useful, for math class). Then C++ in highschool, followed shortly by Perl. Learned PHP the summer after highschool, took classes on Scheme, Java, Haskell and Python in college. Of course I don't remember a lot of those now, and this kid probably won't either. So don't try and railroad him cause it won't work anyway.

Do you know how stupid and childish you look when you say things like 'Windoze' and 'M$'? All that does it let people know that they should ignore whatever else you're saying. And why exactly does a 12 year old care about "an OS and full tool chain"?

Do you not understand the word-symbols you're putting into your computer-box or do you just like being contrarian? God 'designs' things the way he wants them the first time. This music is generated randomly, then subjected to fitness tests in the form of listener reviews. The fittest members survive and provide the input material which is then randomly mutated again for the next generation.

I also have to wonder how they are accounting for selection bias

are they accounting for racial variances

I don't see how either of those issues are affected by this new technique. It's something the police have had to deal with long before this, so I assume they'll continue to do so.

Wal-Mart is winning in my book as they take PayPal and Amazon doesn't. I always use PayPal when buying stuff online.

lol, you owe me a keyboard. Preferably from amazon

don't forget Amazon Prime. $80/yr for free 2-day shipping? That's a guaranteed money-loser for them. And I'm shocked by what they include in that offer. They've sent me all sorts of heavy and bulky items including a 70-pound air compressor and a storage cabinet that was about 4'x4'x3', all free 2-day shipping. Beats driving to the store any day. It also gets you upgrades to overnight shipping for $3.99, so unless you absolutely must have it this instant, online shopping wins.

I agree, I think there's been a backlash against technobabble which is steering scifi away from Star Trek tech-porn towards a more BSG style focused more on people than cool gadgets. I certainly enjoy Star Trek, but they've saturated the gee-whiz-look-at-this-cool-gadget market, and people are ready for something new. Now that we've been exploring space for a few decades, and everyone has cool gadgets, they want more depth in the stories. It's not so much that scifi is running out of steam, it's just evolving as all genres do.

I can't say whether this new policy is in line with their warranty, but I don't see how anyone would make a case that it's discriminatory even where smokers are a protected class. They are targeting the smoke itself, not the smokers. If you're a smoker but you don't do it around your computer, or it just happens to be reasonably clean, you're going to be fine. If you don't smoke, but you like to store your computer in your chimney flue, they're still going to refuse to work on it.

On the other hand, smoke residue is hardly the most dangerous or disgusting thing anyone has had to deal with on the job, and using OSHA as an excuse seems pretty weak. If they just acknowledged that they're going to treat excessive smoke exposure the same way they would excessive heat or humidity, that would seem entirely reasonable.

more education about local conditions, not less education about traffic management

Let's see what the hit count looks like when answers no longer are found from his pubs, in popular search engine results.

Indeed. Google could settle this thing now by removing all News Corp sites from their listings proactively. The screaming from Fox and the Right would be almost deafening though.

So, what free society numbers their citizens?

All of them. Representative government requires an accurate count of citizens, which requires a unique identifier to avoid double-counting.

particularly after our huge victory in NY-23

The one where you got a democrat elected instead of a moderate republican? Or is my satire detector off?

Maybe have a look at this: FDA Food Defect Levels Handbook. For instance, strawberries are allowed to be up to 45% moldy. Wheat flour is A-OK as long as it averages less than 75 insect fragments per 50 grams. Cocoa beans can contain 10mg of mammal feces per pound. The point is, perfection is not possible. The existence of some sexist comments among billions of internet postings doesn't justify condemning the entire community. I'll fully support you in condemning individuals for their own behaviors. However, I think most of us have realized that arguing with internet trolls is futile. So if some jackass statement in a forum isn't followed up with righteous indignation, don't assume everyone else agrees with them.

10% of FOSS developers are black, do you think that would make nigger references OK as long as we kept them under 1%? If 5% of FOSS developers are gay, do you think that allows up to 0.5% faggot references?

No, that wouldn't be ok either. But it also does not make the entire FOSS community racist or homophobic. The author of the article, along with many of his supporters here, seem quite willing to label all men in IT as sexists based on the comments of a few classless idiots. Which is, you know, kind of sexist.

Submitter might want to recheck their calendar. They must have gotten some weird looks when they were trick-or-treating this weekend.