He said that America will be on the right side of history... and it probably will. You have to remember that "History is written by the winners." - George Orwell

"Programming" is a pretty broad term. It can be anything from shell scripts to LOGO to HTML to assembler. What most of you are talking about I agree, shouldn't necessarily be in pre-HS education.

However, there are plenty of high level or graphical languages that can teach the principles of programming, logic/critical thinking, without having to actually "program."

Think something like appInventor or Scratch or Alice... These can be taught at ages young enough to where you can mold the kid into being a more structured thinker and more likely to be "one of those kids who can program" when they actually get to HS, and then you can start introducing more advance programming languages. But just to write it off because you think that it's going to be like when you were in school trying to learn programming is to shortchange all of the advances in programming languages since you were a kid.

(Also, an added benefit of starting earlier, is that it won't affect their high school GPA.)

Just a quick comment:

Admittedly, retail profit margins are pretty thin, however, they aren't uniformly thin. There are certain product that are loss leaders, and there are some that have a healthy profit margin. (Like electrical wire at Home Depot is historically relatively cheap, but the wire nuts that you use as connectors aren't.)

Something like this would be a one time investment that you could amortize over many months, if not years... making it very cheap in the long run. And even if it only steers 1% of the public to a higher profit item, it'll pay for itself... on top of that, it can be a "upsell" to products that don't have good shelf space, they could pay to advertise their product more often than others. And that would be considered gravy...

You know what would stop the "principled" leaking of information? Maybe Governments should stop doing unprincipled things... Wow, now there's something... -D

Really... 33 million in 8 hands. Obviously the marks at the table had the cash to lose if they so desired. If I were them, I would be mad at the casino that their security was so weak, but if I'm betting and losing 33mil in eight hands, I'm really going to be more mad at myself. (Let's be realistic though, if I lost $33 in 8 hands I would probably walk away from the table. :-)

As far as your tag goes, I'd say that your english is also better than most people's english.

Actually, the changing of a wikipedia entry kind of makes it news for nerds. They didn't post the plethora of articles about the Palin gaffe, they posted the one that pertained to geek culture, i.e. the one about wikipedia. I'd say that answers the "How the hell is this news for nerds?" question.

Partiality? Please... to begin with, ever since Fox "news" started broadcasting opinion rather than facts, mainstream media has pretty much went into the crapper. And expecting impartiality amongst nerds? With the Mac acolytes, the Windows vs Linux wars, and the emacs vs vi vs ed neverending debates, you sir, are WAY more of an optimist than I am.

PS Full disclosure... Macs are good for graphics and layout, not real business; Linux; Vi all the way; Palin is a tool.

Good question... I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt it. It probably falls under circumstantial evidence. It's kind of like ramming a file down the barrel of a gun you just shot someone with. They can't use ballistics to prove it, but they might be able to use hair/fiber/residue something else that you might find on one of the CSI:Hoboken shows... (It seems like they have one for every other city...why _not_ Hoboken?)

More likely than not, it just gives the police reason to fixate on you, (and try and build a better case,) than eliminating other suspects.
-D

You know there are going to be some hilarious easter eggs programmed into this game... the only thing that would have made this better would be if it was done by R*S* games. Then you know they would have crossed the line.
-D

Yeah, you better. The "average" can still be low. Let's take a 6th grade class taking a calculus exam. The class "average" would be somewhere around 10%, (if that,) which is considered "low."

I'm not sure about Canadian IQ, but right now, American IQ average is right at 98... a little lower than the "average" for all people.
-D

I think that Acer is reiterating what is said in the article, not doing an apples to oranges comparison.

Due to his lower cost of living, and the ability to do the work equally well, it's driving down the cost for that labor to be done.

(From the article - The intense global competition for work means wages are driven so low that people labour for hours on repetitive, menial tasks, turning employment opportunities into online sweat shops.)

This isn't a new idea... I'm kind of surprized that there was a recent article about it. (I mean Freidman talked about it back around 2004-2005 in his book "The World is Flat.")

Anywho, that's just my $.02
-D

Have you tried The International Music Score Library project? http://imslp.org/ A friend of mine suggested it, it looks like you can search by instrument... -D

Hay is actually different from Straw. (And most of us would rather be called "Good old boy's" rather than "rednecks." Though, to be honest, I can't get to that link from work, so they might just be rednecks...)

-D

To further explain the differences between hay and straw, here's a link.
http://www.delsjourney.com/travels_2001-02/story_list/us/hay_and_straw.htm

While your point is valid... as a sometimes "asker of novice questions," I can tell you that the only thing worse than not getting the answers you need, is being made to feel like crap for asking the question in the first place. And if someone doesn't want to answer questions, that's usually what comes across, whether it's intended or not.

Here's a real-life example that happened to a buddy of mine... (noob) "I'm on system (x) running (y) and I've tried (a), (b), and (c)... What do you think I should do?" (a-hole guru) "Learn to troubleshoot."

Now, I'm not saying that people shouldn't help, I'm just saying that if they don't want to help, they shouldn't... sometimes it helps the open source movement more if some people just stick to whatever it is they do best, and leave the human interaction to those that actually like people. That's just my $.02, feel free to disregard. -D