Gee, Apple has been dying *far* longer than that . . . :)

hawk

I'm no fan of Java-based curricula, for the same reason I'd be no fan of Fortran-based curricula. Computing isn't about one language. Each language and system shows you one hyperplane of a vast multidimensional space. The best programmers know lots of languages, and choose wisely among them — or even create new ones when appropriate.

In the production world, there are times where some C++ or Java code is appropriate ... and there are times when what you want is a couple of lines of shellscript and some pipes ... and there are times when the most sensible algorithm for something can't be neatly expressed in a language like C++ or Java, and really requires something like Common Lisp or Haskell. If you need to exploit multiple processors without getting bogged down in locking bullshit and race conditions, you're much better off using Go than Java.

(Just last night, at a meetup, I was talking with two bright young physicists who reported that their universities don't do a good enough job of teaching Fortran, which is the language they actually need to do their job. Scientific computing still relies heavily on Fortran, Matlab, and other languages well removed from what's trendy in the CS department — no matter if that CS department is in the Java, Haskell, or Python camp. But if you want to learn to write good Fortran, you basically need a mentor in the physics department with time to teach you.)

And there are times when the right thing to do is to create a new language, whether a domain-specific language or a new approach on general-purpose computing. There's a good reason Rob Pike came up with Sawzall, a logs-analysis DSL that compiles to arbitrarily parallel mapreduces; and then Go, a C-like systems language with a rocket engine of concurrency built in.

(And there's a good reason a lot of people adopting Go have been coming not from the C++/Java camps that the Go developers expected, but from Python and Ruby: because Go gives you the raw speed of a concurrent and native-compiled language, plus libraries designed by actual engineers, without a lot of the verbose bullshit of C++ or Java. Would I recommend Go as a first language? I'm not so sure about that ....)

What would an optimal computing curriculum look like? I have no freakin' clue. It would have to cover particular basics — variable binding, iteration, recursion, sequencing, data structures, libraries and APIs, concurrency — no matter what the language. But it can't leave its students thinking that one language is Intuitive and the other ones are Just Gratuitously Weird ... and that's too much of what I see from young programmers in industry today.

It used the FreeBSD networking code. This doesn't mean windows is fast and it's sort of specious. BSD has tricks in the Kernel to make I/O faster that pretty much anything else.

Not sure how you are getting from the factual statement I made to the phantasy you are projecting on me.

It reminds me of a televangelist who was a teetotaler. When confronted with Jesus having made wine out of water, his response was "Yes, we know about this, but we do not like it".

Religion can justify or condemn pretty much anything, so the only rational thing to do is to take religion out of the equation. It certainly should not influence our laws.

I don't know whether you speak out of ignorance, stupidity, contrariness or misplaced belief, but the above is a big fucking lie.
There are lots of programmes that makes people not do bad things. They're called preventative measures, and includes programmes like free methadon for heroin addicts, poverty reduction, incentives to hire ex-cons, psychological and psychiatric assistance programmes, and much more. And they do work - crime rates and recidivism goes down.

If you look at things in black and white and think that if it doesn't stop 100% of the crime it's ineffective, you refuse to see the big picture. It doesn't have to. If leads to a measurable improvement, it does reduce the number of crimes committed and suffering victims.
If that isn't your goal, you're part of the problem, not the solution.

Can you even help yourself from doing that?

Prison sentences serve multiple purposes:

- Deterrence.
Studies show that the length and severity of the sentence is only effective up to a certain point. No one will abstain from doing a crime because they risk 40 years in jail instead of 12. In some cases, too harsh mandatory or customary sentencing has a detrimental effect. A good example is child molestation, where the super-long sentencing causes children to not report their parents, because they don't want to see people they love go to jail for the rest of their lives. They endure instead, and become more traumatized. Another example is capital punishment. When that is in place, it is in the interest of a criminal to kill witnesses and police, because it won't make the sentencing any harder, but will make it more likely they get away with it.
Yes, deterrence works. Up to a point. Based on that factor, the sentencing here in the US is far too long for the maximal effect.

- Prevention
While in prison, the opportunity to commit the same crime as arrested for is low. This has an effect when the recidivism risk is high. But the way it is used in the US is not based on statistics, but on fucking feelings. The crimes with the highest recidivism rates get shorter sentencing than the ones with lower recidivism rates. So it's obviously not a main concern. Many other countries split the sentencing between the actual punishment and an additional detainment, which is meant to be for preventative reasons. A few even factor in the risk of recidivism.

- Rehabilitation.
It is in society's best interest that a convicted criminal returns to society as a productive member; the sooner, the better. Most Western countries try to use the time criminals spend incarcerated in preparing them for returning to a normal life, not to "reward" the criminal, but because it greatly reduces recidivism and costs to everyone. In the US, there's pretty much no rehabilitation, and the number of ex-convicts who return to crime is astonishingly high compared to the rest of the world.

- Revenge.
It doesn't undo the crime, and drags those exacting revenge down to the same level as the criminal. It certainly doesn't make the criminal any more inclined to become a happy member of society. Few countries now support this, and almost all that do, do it for religious reasons.

Yes, sentencing is necessary when someone is caught for a crime. But the sentencing needs to be rational, and not based on feelings. And better yet is to reduce the number of people sentenced by reducing the risk of crime before it happens. I know, alien concept, and you won't get your righteous rocks off as much by reading about caught perps.

The audience's actions being prompted by people with cue boards, etc., of course.

Thanks, I've been grappling with words for this for a while after having started to work in a really nerdy place. It's ok, but strangely aggravating, and you put it very well, especiall the last part. There's also no use in pointing it out to some people, it simply does not register, just like on /. sometimes.

I think all 6 stars of Friends were pulling in $1M/episode at the end of its run. What was once outrageous is now common place. I guess that is progress of sorts.

It was a bit more than that. He recruited Obokata to RIKEN, was her mentor, and supervised her STAP work. As you said, there is not even the slightest hint that he was engaged in any misconduct, but the RIKEN investigation did find that Sasai and Wakayama carried “heavy responsibility” for what happened, and the incident opened questions about how closely co-authors and research advisers should oversee the work of their underlings.

Sales receipts for out-of-state purchases can be fingerprinted, and compared to use tax declarations. And this has indeed come up too, in a slightly more limited way. At least one state have asked some online retailers to be Bcced on all sales receipts.

Key words like "evaded" and "90mph" may be set up to trigger manual inspection. Bayesian filtering can be used for more than catching spam.

The scientific model is quite simply:
1) Develop testable hypothesis (aka theory)
2) Develop experiments/observations to test hypothesis
3) Perform experiment/observations
4) Repeat
Anyone who participates in any of these steps is performing science. It took a while to find practical tests of String theory given it's extreme generality, but several have been suggested and a few have even been performed, ranging from the scale of planetary motion to LHC data.

The first things we'd expect to find or see from satellite photographs are bits of wing and tail. The shock of a crash-landing would fracture them off. Then if the fuel tanks were ruptured, those would create oil slicks even if they were underwater. Live vests and seat cushions should also float, as well as bits of trimming from the passenger cabin. Then all sorts of passenger belongings should also float.

So the chances are the pilot aimed for a controlled landing in the ocean. There were witnesses who claimed to see a burning aircraft (from an oil-ring), and another who said they saw an aircraft flying low towards Garcia Diego.

The "rotten corpses" is more likely to be due to the 1300kg of Lithium batteries that were on board that flight. Interestingly both flights were carrying lithium batteries and travelling towards the Far East.