The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.
The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.
The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.
I think a strict language in the ML family would even be nicer, because students wouldn't have to reason about laziness.
Consciousness in the medical sense can be considered along axes of wakefulness and awareness. For example, in a coma the subject is neither aware nor awake.
In contrast, patients in a persistent vegetative state are awake, but not aware. It sounds like the researchers may have replicated this state of consciousness, which would imply that the claustrum is important in awareness, but perhaps not as critical in wakefulness, at least in this particular subject (keeping in mind that her brain is already abnormal in some sense due to epilepsy and neurosurgery that excised the left side of her hippocampus).
Most of the emails I send contain no formatting whatsoever, except for indentation, paragraphs and other formatting that can be represented just fine using plain text.
Why should I wastefully send unneeded markup that inflates the size of my email several times larger than what's actually needed?
I don't think that is a very good argument in these modern times, with the relatively huge storage and bandwidth availability. The extra size of such formatting markup is negligible.
Checking my mail archive, the HTML part of multipart messages is on average 5 to 10 times larger than the plaintext part. Such a factor is essentially never irrelevant, even with decently fast connections it often takes me a minute or so to download a day’s worth of e.g. debian-user messages.
Similarly, I’d be quite annoyed if my local IMAP cache took five to ten times as much space than it does at the moment for no reason whatsoever (other than filling up an extra 8 to 18 GB).
This preference is based on the assumption that the extra information conveyed in the HTML part of the email is worthless, which may not be the case.
I can see from the downvotes that some HN users are excessively passionate about their plain text emails, but many people do prefer the extra formatting and layout that a well-constructed HTML email can provide.
This can be observed in general by the fact that almost everyone uses web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome - rather than Lynx.
For people who are sending email with no HTML features it seems weird to inflate that email with unused unseen cruft.
Many people send email that makes minimal use of HTML features. They perhaps have an auto-appended footer with useless information that is in italics. It's debatable whether the extra size of HTML email is worth it for such minor formatting.
But no one is suggesting that the tiny number of people who "prefer the extra formatting and layout that a well-constructed HTML email can provide" should use plain text emails.
> This can be observed in general by the fact that almost everyone uses web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome - rather than Lynx.
No. Poor quality design has meant that much of the modern web is unusable for many web browsers. Not just "specialist" browser such as Lynx but for some versions of the browsers you list.
> [...] but many people do prefer the extra formatting and
> layout that a well-constructed HTML email can provide.
I think that's where the issue is --- nearly all HTML e-mail that I encounter is not of the well-constructed variety, and thus doesn't merit the extra overhead.
In a non-professional context (mailing lists, personal communications), I do just fine with plain-text; in a professional context, I loathe receiving e-mails that utilise what HTML brings because it's nearly always abused in the form of excessive signatures or massive legalese footers shrunk to 6pt, italicised, and rendered in nearly invisible grey.
Any content that really requires the extra formatting and layout offered by HTML would probably be better sent as an attachment anyway. I've lost count of the number of times I've had excerpts from spreadsheets or brochures pasted into an e-mail which have then been mangled in transit, or stretch way off the screen.
I've yet to see a "well constructed" HTML email that was sent by a human as part of an email conversation.
I've seen plenty of poorly constructed HTML emails sent by people who decided that since they can have twelve different fonts in five sentences, with italics, bold, outline, underline and strikethrough thrown in, they should do so. It's almost like they have set themselves a challenge to use every feature of their email client in every message.
Plain text, on the other hand, always looks sensible, well-formed and well constructed to me. This leaves it to the sender to write something worth the effort of reading.
Well, in practice, HTML in emails almost never is worth it, and that's not because richer markup is necessarily a bad idea, but because people don't grasp the concepts, and because what plain text provides almost always is actually powerful enough, while being a lot easier to use - which is important, given that emails tend to be read once, in contrast to websites, which tend to be read lots of times, so more effort in composing them is justified.
In order to compose an HTML email that actually takes advantage of the power of HTML, you have to grasp the abstraction between what you see on the screen and the underlying document structure, and how that underlying structure might be rendered by different receiving MUAs - something that most users don't grasp at all, and also a problem that's not particular to HTML email, but one that is well-known to affect all WYSIWYG authoring tools, and one that is known to be particularly problematic with document types that can be rendered very differently depending on the "medium".
By contrast, the typewriter style interface of plain text email composition is something that's completely intuitive to most people, and people easily succeed at composing an email that reliably will be rendered at the receiving end exactly as they expect - and most of the structure that you need for most email correspondence can actually easily be constructed manually from individual characters (headings, paragraphs, lists, numbered lists, ...).
Also, it can be observed that almost everyone reads books and journals typeset with TeX or DTP software. That's not exactly a good reason against creating your shopping list with a pencil.
They require sensible line wrapping. Line wrapping text is good, even required for commit messages, but line wrapping git patches is obviously a catastrophe. On Gmail you can't turn wrapping off (and you can't send patches anyway as it elides leading indentation and changes tabs to spaces).
You'd be wasting your time as there is no feedback as to whether your attempts have worked to frustrate their targeting, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that someone picks up on your efforts and casually flags you to make your life more difficult - extra searches at borders, no fly list, and so on.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They may have stopped attacks but not revealed any information about this publicly, or engaged in misdirection as to their role using parallel construction.
Absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. It's absence of proof that is not proof of absence. It may or may not be strong evidence, depending on how likely evidence is, but it is evidence.
Then, the governing body of the United States, which is to say (nominally, anyway) the people of the United States are utterly unable to determine the effectiveness of this organization under their charge. Close it down.
Hidden services can't be located in that manner unless the owner has badly misconfigured the service so it's reachable by IP address. A typical configuration would have the service listening on 127.0.0.1 or a private (RFC 1918) network address only, and have Tor connect to that.
Headline should be modified to indicate that the study was carried out in the USA. It's not generally applicable to the world population, or necessarily to all high-income countries.
The problem with 'intelligent design' is that it's such an infantile way of trying to understand the world. Stating "God did it", rather than using one's brain to figure out the mechanisms of how the world works, is just lazy, regressive thinking that doesn't advance our knowledge and understanding in any way whatsoever.
How do you know it doesn't work? From all we've been told (very little, mostly through leaks) there isn't enough information to make that judgement.
The key issue isn't the potential benefit of mass surveillance in dealing with crimes or potential crimes, but rather its risk to individual privacy and the danger of enabling authoritarian governance.
The author starts from an assumption that the Bible is true and cherry-picks evidence in an attempt to support that, choosing the interpretation (or misinterpretation) that best fits into his pre-existing biases.
Not convincing unless one has already been indoctrinated into the belief that everything is 'God-given', rather than being more open-minded and inquisitive about the nature of the world.
The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.