I think that a major reason for the entire problem spectra of US is them being a "two party" democracy - It hardly counts as a functional democracy at all. The entire republicans vs democrats chatter seems ridiculous to an outside observer... More like a gang turf war than anything else.
I'm not sure what should be taken seriously if at all from it, either. But lets pretend for a moment that's irrelevant and the article does have a point:
During the last couple of days, we got to see this attitude you've demonstrated here, unfortunately, much too often - Not everybody here is from the US and it isn't all about you. Your surveillance is affecting us all but most of the discussion is about how it affects US citizens, since the rest of the world has no rights in the first place.
Administrative arrest in Israel isn't indefinite, there's a similar process where they ask a judge to prolong it and as a citizen I believe that they do. However from what we understand from the media, they might be asking the judges without explaining the details to them because of confidentiality.
The point is you can't ask a judge to prolong it in the US. You ask a judge for your right to be charged or released. That is why I say I don't think the six month renewals have any effect.
Thanks for sharing this. The way these are defined reminds me of the way I'd be defining methods in SML - a base case and then a recursive one to deal with the tail.
What are you guys talking about? My main machine has 1.25GB of RAM and is 10 years old.
Sure I don't use it for modern gaming and sure I've delegated tasks to much stronger uni machines a few times in the past but other than the occasional hw problems due to age it still works and is mostly enough...
Honestly as somebody who reads/ writes C every couple of months, I don't see what's so clever about it. This level of understanding for a C programmer should be the bare minimum, I think...
I'm actually inclined to think there isn't. The things I want from a computer and what finds success in the market don't necessarily line up that well.
I built the laptop I'm typing this on out of parts from three different Thinkpads because I wanted a 64-bit machine with a trackpoint and a high-quality 4:3 screen and nobody made one. About one in four of the programmer/IT types I talked to about it agreed that was a good use of my time and money.
It's essentially a 14" 4:3 Thinkpad T61 motherboard in a 15" 4:3 T60 chassis. They don't quite mix and match perfectly and I had to file down a couple places on the frame to make it fit. This is a fairly popular modification among enthusiasts of the classic Thinkpad line, as it's generally thought to be the best possible 4:3 Thinkpad. The keyboard came from an unknown machine (ebay) and was on a W500 for a while; I chose the part number generally regarded as slightly better than the others. The wifi card, hard drive, AC adapter and battery came from a W500. The wifi card required a BIOS hacked to remove the hardware whitelist.
Display: QXGA (2048x1536) panel, when I can find one for less than $400
CPU: If something Penryn shows up cheap or free, I'll put it in
Disk: An SSD, obviously, perhaps with a hard drive in the optical bay
Battery: I'm betting there are some modern cells with higher capacity I can put in the old shell
Pretty much everything that can be done with these has been done by somebody on http://forum.thinkpads.com, so it's pretty low-risk if the idea of a semi-custom laptop appears to you. 4:3 T61 motherboards and QXGA panels are rare and often priced higher than you would expect, but the rest of the parts are cheap and easy to come by. Careful ebay shopping may procure the rare parts for a more reasonable price.
I'm glad to see that they are considering longer periods than a semester: I started the course and enjoyed the ability to view the lectures at a high speed and the exercises were to the point (Even if rather easy but it was expected for an introduction course). But I couldn't finish it due to real life university load.
I would like to see more flexible deadlines such as 2/3 weeks since the last assignment for ex. but I understand it wouldn't be manageable when taking midterms and finals into account or provide significantly more work having to make a few of those or delay if they were at constant dates...
I cannot verify/ negate the comment about the movie. However neither can the fact that you're unfamiliar with it.
I do however see a problem with your eagerness to find an excuse to discredit the posts contents... If you've never heard of any of it and you consider yourself well educated on the subject, you've been clearly fed some of the abundant propaganda...