Tolkien wrote about (and used) his invented languages in his personal correspondence as well as in his scholarly (non-fiction) work.

Don't forget that he was a linguist first and foremost. His invented languages were object lessons in linguistic theory.

C is a perfect language to cut teeth on if the goal is to become the best programmer one can be.

Then explain to me why the best engineering schools on the planet (MIT, Stanford, CalTech) now use Python as their instruction language. Prior to that they used Lisp. At no point did they ever use C.

Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should* do it. A good engineer uses the best tool for the job, period. If you worked for me and spent hours writing a C program that could have been done in minutes in a dynamic language, you'd get a reprimand (at the very least).

2 problems with that statement:

1 - in the real world, there's never enough time to design, code and test everything properly. I've been programming professionally for 23 years, and I can count the number of times I've had enough time to do something on one hand.

2 - Efficient, yes. Reliable, not necessarily. Even highly experienced C programmers write code with buffer overruns, memory leaks, etc. Those kinds of bugs are basically impossible to create in a memory-managed language. Using libPCRE in C it takes a dozen lines of code (if not more) to duplicate what you can do in a single line of Perl. How much additional code would you have to write in a C program to duplicate the behavior of turning on Taint mode in Perl?

Exactly. When you are writing code for a living, time is money. The tool that lets you do the most work with the least effort maximizes your RoI. Time to market is a competitive advantage. Programmer efficiency is almost always more important than execution efficiency.

On a decent Linux distro, virtually all of the Perl modules you need are installable through the package system.

That said, I'd rather wrestle with CPAN than JVM classpath issues.

Dynamic (scripting) languages are no less "real" than compiled languages. Both have their place, their strengths, and their weaknesses, which is something a "seasoned developer" should know.

An instruction language should just get out of your way and let you concentrate on doing stuff and understanding the CONCEPTS, instead of concentrating on making the compiler/interpreter understand you or doing routine housekeeping (eg: memory management). This is true for real-world development, but is especially relevant when teaching someone how to program. For this reason, Python is an excellent choice as a first language -- even MIT uses Python as a teaching language. (I can't think of a better endorsement than that)

The advantage that Python has over other dynamic languages (Perl, Ruby) is that it is designed for readability and clarity. Even as a die-hard Perl programmer, even I can admit that Python is an easier language to learn and explain, and is probably the first language I'll teach my children. Whether it's (IMHO) dumbed-down syntax is an advantage or a disadvantage for doing serious work is a subject of debate (if not holy wars).

C is a wonderful language for a specific class of problem, but it has lots of problems that make it suboptimal (if not completely unsuitable) for other tasks. Knowing *when* to use C (and, more importantly, when *not* to use it) is as important as knowing *how* to use it, if not more so. It is not a good teaching language for a beginning programmer, any more than it is a good language for general application development. Someone who doesn't understand this has no business calling themselves a "seasoned developer".

The States Rights argument was killed on April 9th, 1865, and it's tombstone was erected on July 9th, 1868.

If the objective is to keep kids from seeing Pr0n, the better approach is a .kids TLD. This way you can have contractual requirements (and penalties) that the content there must be kid-safe. Of course that opens the debate as to what is "kid safe"... I don't want my kids exposed to evangelical Christian propaganda anymore than the religious retards want their kids to find out about birth control and evolution.

It's never going to be safe to let your kids out on the wild, wooly .com internet without supervision. It's a pipe dream by lazy parents, a textbook example of the low-effort thinking that promotes conservatism.

Ron Paul's strength is that he accurately identifies a lot of problems.

Ron Paul's weakness is that his "solutions" to those problems are dangerously naive, based on long-discredited theories, or are just downright crazy (or all of the above).

Any enthusiasm about RP has to be tempered with the realization that even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Frothy.

Now all we need is a promise from Romney that you won't hold any position of authority in his administration if he's elected. You're unfit to hold any public office.

Spam has two levels of cost - the victimization of the people who receive the spam, and the bandwidth and processing costs borne by ISPs and network operators. I know from firsthand experience working at a large ISP that anti-spam alone was a multi-million dollar cost center and accounted for around 85% of our bandwidth costs.

Based on what I've seen, improving filter efficiency at the backbone/ISP level has the paradoxical effect of increasing spam traffic - if enough of their messages aren't getting through, the spammers will just keep throwing more spam at you until enough leaks through for them to get a sucker. If you improve your filter efficiency by an order of magnitude, they'll just throw an order of magnitude more spam at you, and since they are typically using stolen resources to do their spamming, it's not costing them much (if any) more to do so. The cost remains near-zero and even a single successful scam can potentially net hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

The core problem is that SMTP is fundamentally broken with regards to spam (among many other problems). It's a problem the authors just didn't (and probably couldn't) envision. The problem won't go away as long as sending millions of emails is effectively free (in terms of time, computation, and money)

The rate at which a bot or rogue server can send email is entirely network-bound. Email has to be redesigned from the top down so that it is inherently rate-limited by some irreducible factor. Increasing the computational cost to send email using a memory-bound function seems to be the best way to do this (the rationale being that memory bandwidth has historically only increased at a fraction of CPU speed).

The tl;dr version is that crime pays... and unfortunately that will never change. What can do is change is the economics of sending email by increasing the computational cost by several orders of magnitude. This may not solve the problem of individuals getting scammed, but it will dramatically reduce network congestion and infrastructure costs.

Politics is about getting and retaining power. Anything that helps achieve this goal is by definition part of politics. Attacking your opponent is definitely a core element of the political process.

Sure, we can think about a utopian fantasy world where all politicians act for the public good, base policy on factual information and rational thought, eschew fallacious reasoning, Unfortunately, we live in the real world where fallacious arguments, propaganda, and outright lies are an indelible part of politics because they are highly effective tools for persuading/controlling people.

Which are almost entirely law-abiding citizens who forgot to put their legally-owned and -carried knife/gun/screwdriver/whatever in their checked baggage.

Not to mention the fact that the TSA's failure rate is 70%. So if 4 weapons are getting found daily, they're missing at least 9 or 10 a day. That's 3,650 weapons on airplanes a year, with ZERO incidents resulting therefrom.

This is America. The knowledgeable and motivated sociopaths are too busy making MONEY to bother about making a POINT.

No filter is 100% effective. It costs effectively nothing to spam a 10 million addresses, but for sake of argument say it costs $100. If 1% of those get through the defenses, and 1% of the non-filtered recipients falls for your scam, you've got your hooks into 1,000 suckers. Even if you only take each sucker for $1 your ROI is 1000%.

Either windows in a VM running on Linux or vice-versa. For real work (coding) you have Linux; for everything else you use Windows. It works especially well if you have a multi-monitor setup.