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For those of you who didn't see it, Jon Stewart just performed a brilliant parody of Glenn Beck: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-18-2010/conservative-libertarian Central to his arguments against Beck: slippery slopes slip both ways. Beck paints doom and gloom of a Nazi/Stalinist totalitarian state while never mentioning the possibility of a theocratic totalitarian state. While saying progressive virtues "lead to" the latter, the possibility that religious values my "lead to" the former is never addressed. Oh yes, and libertarians are lying aryan Berts! (I guess I'm one of them, although I'm a liberaltarian, so I'm still a lying aryan but at least I'm not EVIL BERT)

It seems the FOX failure has crept into the forums as well!

FOX News: we have technical difficulties with our satellite link when Democrats speak

Oh my, when I tried to read that it broke my brain.

I've finished The Difference Engine, which was, well... a good read, albeit strange. I'm now reading The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson, my second Stephenson book after Snow Crash. It's a story about how the advent of molecular nanotechnology will affect the word, sort of like a fictional future based on Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation.

I've begun reading (for the second time, because I didn't finish it the first time) The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. This book is one of the progenators of the whole idea of "steampunk", and posits an alternate past in which Charles Babbage managed to bring on the computer revolution in the 19th century through the use of "engines", mechanical computers.

Personally I think PHP is a terrible first language. In general, it's very messy and uncohesive, and its semantics are rather ad hoc as opposed to being planned. It has some of the worst type coercion I've ever seen ("3 dog night" + 2 = 5?!!!). Object orientation was tacked-on after-the-fact and is not used by the standard library. The standard library is enormous, with many functions that duplicate each other. Determining which version is best for the task at hand is often difficult (I should use mysql_real_connect instead of mysql_connect?), and worse, often writing things yourself in PHP are better than using the hooks into C libraries provided by the stdlib, which is totally counterintuitive (I assume because the runtime used to be even slower than it is now). The PHP interpreter is also extremely slow (in some cases slower than the standard Ruby interpreter), however the language is not featureful and expressive like Ruby, so you're really getting the worst of both worlds: a slow, low quality language. I would suggest learning another language like Python or Ruby first, then moving to PHP later.

Well, that said, I can't help but link to what I think are the greatest source of video lectures on computer programming: The Sussman/Abelson SICP lectures While this course is intended for freshmen, I wouldn't recommend it for beginners. If you are a well seasoned imperative programmer who's wondering what all this functional stuff is about, these are a great series of lectures I would love for you to watch.

Eh? Time limit? Python is free and certainly doesn't have any kind of time limit. What exactly did you install?

I think logic languages are an interesting thought experiment but generally impractical for most applications. I've seen some people attempt herculean tasks with logic languages and get extremely frustrated when they can't quite pull them off.

PHP isn't close to C at all. PHP's closest relatives are shell scripting languages, such as Perl, awk, sed, etc. PHP contains some functions with similar names to C functions, however PHP remains a dynamically typed (barely) garbage collected language with many extreme cases of type coersion. It's the only language I know where "3 dog night" + 2 = 5. That said, PHP is probably a very bad language to start with. It's a horrible amalgamation of different languages fraught with bad design decisions by its creators.

The CUDA SDK is aimed at C, although as I said earlier, it can be targeted by any language with a compiler that can output CUDA opcodes, like Obsidian in Haskell.

Note that nothing presented on either of those sites will help you target an architecture like CUDA.

Yes MIT recently switched to Python as their introductory language for their CS courses (for purely practical reasons, too)