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Comment BASIC is great for kids (Score 4, Insightful) 548

I disagree with the premise that BASIC teaches bad habits. I stick with the old adage a bad workman blames his tools. BASIC teaches kids (like I was over 30 years ago) from the ages of 5-6 how to put together simple logic, and gives them the very basics of languages constructs like variables, loops, sub routines, etc. without them having to grasp structures, classes, polymorphism, OO, etc. that a lot of grown ups that have been involved with writing code for quite some time can have issues with.

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NASA Wants To Fund Space Taxis 136

NASA plans on using $50 million in stimulus funds to seed development of a commercial passenger transportation service to space. Potential space taxi inventors have 45 days to submit their proposals. The proposals will be competitively evaluated and the winners will be announced by the end of September. It is unclear what other Commodore 64 games NASA plans on making a reality, but I hope Arkanoid makes the short list.

Comment Normality resuming? (Score 1) 110

I think what we'll see is what we witnessed after every boy and their dog figured out how to create a HTML page complete with flashing text, awful animated GIFs and background MIDI music. As many have pointed out, nobody cares what Mrs. Rita Boddingworth of 42 Jackass Lane, Nowhereville did between the hours of 6pm and 10pm the night of February 17th or any other night, and so as the reality of this sets into the frenzied benign bloggers and they realize that their time might be well worth spent doing something more productive we'll see a drop in the number of redundant blah blogs just as the masses of Geocities pages died in the early part of this decade.

Blogging has however isn't all negative, it has created a useful paradigm for those people who actually have something useful and worthwhile to say. You can tell these people from the average blogger, while the person who uses this tool for good will probably post say once a week or less but when they post it won't be a rant which nobody gives a toss about and instead it will be some nugget of information which will probably help people out. On the other hand though, you have the other blogger who religiously jumps onto Blogspot or some other blog equiv of myspace and fills in the dreary details of their boring, insignificant life every single day down to the nth detail. Not that I'm necessarily ragging on the blogger here, as there's 6 billion people in the world and most of us lead fairly unassumingly dull lives, I just wish people would realize that most of us also lead the same life and thus have no need to read about it all over again.

Oh...one last point, bloggers as journalists.....please see some sense. That's like saying any monkey that can create a web page is a coder.....true, both can techincally code (something) but who are you going to employ to write software to control your car's safety features?

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