Apparently, you talk to one of their official representatives and set up an appointment.

I went through the process once. I was assured that the god in question was there. I couldn't quite make him out in the audience, though.

The FSM has changed focus. It was once just an argument against religious interference in schools. Now it's something like those people who claim their religion as "Jedi."

People are having fun with the concept. Let them have it. If people actually want to get married in front of a real god, they'll do so. If you don't want people making fun of your religion, quit using laws to shove it down our throats.

I was just considering intelligence, not necessarily space-faring. Honestly, we're barely a space-faring race ourselves.

Either way, we're working on way too little data at this point to do more than guess. We know a bit more about other planetary systems than we used to, but we're still largely ignorant. We've got statistics we can work with, but the variables we're feeding into it are flimsy at best. My reasoning for thinking we're not the first intelligent species is the number of stars in the galaxy - there's a whole whopping shitload of them. When we compare that to the tiny amount of time an intelligent species has been on this planet vs. the time between when planets first formed in the galaxy to now, however, we're certainly the newbies.

It's all a moot point unless we figure out a way to go out and look, though. Maybe one day we, or something we become later, will be able to do that.

I've heard that theory before, and I doubt its accuracy.

Life like ours, out on the surface, would have difficulty living without the magnetic field, but we evolved on this planet. Life that evolves in an ocean doesn't have to worry about radiation. Look at Europa, for instance - we think it's possible for life to evolve there, and it's in a much harsher environment than the Earth would be even without a magnetic field.

If life evolved in an ocean on a planet with a dead core, and eventually left the ocean to colonize land, it would evolve the capability of dealing with the environment. Perhaps it would have extra redundancy in its DNA analog, or maybe it would not even use a cell-based system like we do. Who knows?

That said, while life might be more common than you think, you might be right about intelligence - at least at our moment in time. I would be very surprised, however, if we were the first intelligent life in this galaxy.

I never used Logo, because none of the schools I attended in the 80s taught programming until high school, and by that age BASIC and Pascal were the languages of choice.

That said, I first learned BASIC by drawing things on an Atari 800. It was just PLOT and DRAWTO statements, so to do anything interesting you had to use loops and conditionals. It was a blast.

I can see where Logo would have been popular in the places it was taught.

Most of 'em.

See CLEP.

It's a good way to lighten your coarse load. It's not horribly unusual for people to use CLEP to graduate a semester or two early.

I thought of that (although I was thinking HBO's True Blood), but Spike isn't a pay channel. Then again, Spike isn't a major broadcast network, either.

Maybe I'm showing my age.

(off topic: according to the Wikipedia page List of entertainment affected by the September 11 attacks, the WTC appears in scenes where an angel shows how the world would be if Kernit the Frog had never been born. So apparently, the truthers are wrong: Kermit caused 9/11!)

That's a good point. They could frame it as a movement gone out of control, and villanize the extremists.

That would probably play well to the execs.

The Reds were a terrorist group in the books, but weren't exactly the bad guys. I wonder how the show's writers and executives are going to portray that in today's environment.

Come to think of it, most of the characters in the book were "terrorists," at least from the point of view of the UN organization that governed the project. It has massive infrastructure destruction (don't want to spoil it), guerilla warfare, cultural sectarianism, etc.

I doubt the network execs are going to allow that on the TV show without some major editing.

ABIs change much more rapidly than APIs, and there are so many platforms to choose from. If the project isn't actively maintained, source code distribution is the only way that makes sense.

Three year old .deb or .rpm files can be a pain to deal with, and it only gets worse over time. Often, they're linked to library versions that are outdated and clash with the system libraries. Yes, there's ways to solve those problems - both from the packager's point of view and the user's point of view - but why bother when you can just distribute the source code and leave it to the user to compile? If it's important enough, a distribution maintainer will pick it up and make binary packages available.

Getting reluctant code to compile on your system used to be a required skill for UNIX sysadmins. In my opinion, it still should be. The problems we had in 1994 haven't changed, and in some ways, i.e. Linux's horrible backwards compatibility compared to, say, Solaris - they have gotten worse.

Thanks for the insight. I was curious.

I knew a couple X2s when I was in - both promoted to the point where they hadn't done any actual code in years - and they gave me a positive impression of Ada, but I've never used it myself.

Maybe I'll give it a shot one of these days.

Yeah, I saw that. It's definitely a step in the right direction.

Javascript is schizophrenic to the extreme. It's always struck me as a poorly implemented LISP that was pounded into something that looked like C. It's not so horrible once you get to know it, but learning it was a major pain in the ass.

My university is considering making it the first language they teach. I suggested to the instructor that it was probably not a good idea.

I wasn't doing your exercise, I was just doing an implementation of the PHP code (the earlier one without the htmlspecialchars() call) for shits and giggles.

If you're doing text manipulation, Perl's probably the way to go. The base language is set up well for it, and CPAN is full of text manipulation libraries.

I'd never suggest Perl as a first language, but it sounds like you've got other languages under your belt already.

I'd hate to use it outside of UNIX, though. Perl's very UNIXy. But I came to it as a sysadmin, not as a programmer, and I use it as a glue language more than anything else, so maybe that's just me.

Perl 5 has objects, BTW. The syntax is just weird for them. It's no worse (and probably better) than Javascript's funny OO system.

Wait...

Do you mean you were actually using Perl in DOS, or that you actually rebooted a Windows machine rather than just close the command window?

Care to rephrase? Because honestly, no one has had to do either in over a decade.