Slashdot Mirror

• ...is standardized - an open standard.
• ...also has free quality open source compilers and interpreters which adhere to the open standard.
• ...uses lazy reduction, which means that a wider variety of functions normalize, as opposed to strict reduction.
• ...is purely functional, which leads to more elegant and easier to understand programs. Formal analysis is allot easier when the language is purely functional as opposed to polluted.
• ...allows for imperative or procedural features through the use of monads. So you can have your cake (purity) and eat it too (imperative/procedural aspects).
• ...uses function currying to ease the use of higher order functions and to decrease the reliance of all those damn parenthesis!
• ...is statically typed and uses type inference too, so you don't even have to explicitly tell the compiler what types you are using. It can do all the dirty work for you, yet still give you very high automatic assurance of program correctness.
• ...is simply better designed. Its syntax, semantics, and APIs are more simple, consistant, and pure than Lisp and its many incarnations.

Several radio stations have been contacted. Also dmcasucks.org asks you to Honk Your Horn at 10 am. Even if you're in your driveway.

Finally part of the proceeds from the book "DMCA go to the EFF.

The relevant link is here:DMCA by Marcia K Wilbur

The book has gone from a 372,000 give or take 100 sales rating to 61,840 since December 2000. No. 2 bestseller right behind Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright.

If you need a discussion about the topic, openlaw.org's dvd-discuss list, slashdot archives in the Your Rights Online topic, and Jessica Litman's book do a pretty good job.

If you want to know how we got here and what's at stake, DMCA includes comments questions and answers as well as a copy of the DMCA, former President Clinton's comments on the DMCA as he signed it, and a history of copyright law.

T_f_J, you're entitled to an opinion, of course, but your vocabulary in itself demonstrates the problem. To serve the economic and egoistic purposes of various Influential Entities, programming languages have become like car styles and Parisian fashions. Who judges that a programming language "belongs in a by-gone" era? What's the basis for that judgment? Is it that it hasn't a Roy Oily animal character and book assigned it yet? Is it that there's no John Wayne icon picked for it? Surely, a programming language is judged based upon the readiness with which its practitioners can build real systems while keeping an eye on long term costs and adaptability to changes in requirements.

If popularity were the test of achievement, then Visual Basic is (and remains, despite some deflation) king of the hill. You can't really mean that.

Most people who embrace Smalltalk have tried many other languages in professional contexts and are simply compelled to use it. There are lots of reasons why programmers unfamiliar with Smalltalk are missing out, even if they don't or can't use it. It's a powerful idea. I've described some of these in a letter to the editor of Dr Dobbs about a year ago. Smalltalk repeatedly surprises even its afficianados with rediscovered power and grace.

And if you want to see some of the other reasons Smalltalk wins, check out John McIntosh's site, Peter Lount's place, and the nifty (IMO) Dolphin Smalltalk.

It's fine to explore this era of history, and great that Berkeley has done a comprehensive job of covering one side of the story so well. But it's important to remember there are always two sides of the issue. For a point of view from someone who was on the side of the 'rebels' during this period, but who has had a lot of second thoughts, read some of these well thought out perspectives on the history of this movement. I was a 'student radical' at the U of Minnesota in the late 70's. I even called the U of M Board of Regents 'Motherfuckers' once on a bullhorn. I've changed my opinion, and now think I was a damn fool back then. Make sure you look at both sides and don't get involved in foolish adventurism.

It's fine to explore this era of history, and great that Berkeley has done a comprehensive job of covering one side of the story so well. But it's important to remember there are always two sides of the issue. For a point of view from someone who was on the side of the 'rebels' during this period, but who has had a lot of second thoughts, read some of these well thought out perspectives on the history of this movement. I was a 'student radical' at the U of Minnesota in the late 70's. I even called the U of M Board of Regents 'Motherfuckers' once on a bullhorn. I've changed my opinion, and now think I was a damn fool back then. Make sure you look at both sides and don't get involved in foolish adventurism.

It's fine to explore this era of history, and great that Berkeley has done a comprehensive job of covering one side of the story so well. But it's important to remember there are always two sides of the issue. For a point of view from someone who was on the side of the 'rebels' during this period, but who has had a lot of second thoughts, read some of these well thought out perspectives on the history of this movement. I was a 'student radical' at the U of Minnesota in the late 70's. I even called the U of M Board of Regents 'Motherfuckers' once on a bullhorn. I've changed my opinion, and now think I was a damn fool back then. Make sure you look at both sides and don't get involved in foolish adventurism.

If there is a positive effect to discovering this 'new' weapon... at least the resulting blast doesn't irradiate the counrtyside, just lots of dust, heat, and debris.
---
Don Rude - AKA - RudeDude

Everyone likes a good cause.

This is false. Money buys protection against punishment for nonpayment of taxes and taxes are not "collectively" collected -- they are collected by sadistic police-power:

Federal Reserve + IRS = The Protection Racket Coup of 1913

by Jim Bowery
Jim Bowery, January 13, 2001 -- The author grants the right to copy, without modification.

INTRODUCTION

Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character. The transition to this form of money began in 1913, when the 16th Amendment dramatically expanded the potential need for legal tender in the form of taxes while, in that same year, the Federal Reserve Act started the process of removing from legal tender any backing value other than the protection it affords against punishment. That the redefinition of "legal tender" was unconstitutional(1) has become only a minor dimension of the massive decay in legitimacy and moral leadership during the 20th century triggered by these acts of 1913. These acts were largely in the interest of continental European banking concerns doing business under the name of J. P. Morgan. As vital interests of the United States were sacrificed on their behalf, those foreign interests are reasonably called "enemies of the United States", the acts of U.S. citizens on their behalf "treasons", and all such citizens "traitors".

THE MORAL HAZARD OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY

Legitimate governments provide assurance that we are secure in our lives and properties by protecting our legal rights in exchange for taxes and other duties. The most legitimate governments will even back up their commitment by providing some sort of compensation if our legal rights are breached, much the same as insurance companies do when they pay out on an insurance policy. But there is a fine line between protection rackets and insurance companies. Indeed, gangsters frequently call their protection rackets "insurance" and the payments they extort from their victims "insurance premiums". That fine line between protector and protection racket is crossed when "moral hazard" tempts the "protector" beyond the limits of his character.

In conventional insurance terminology, "moral hazard" is the temptation to artificially increase hazards. A classic case of moral hazard is an otherwise unprofitable business buying lots of fire insurance and then hiring an arsonist to burn down the place of business.

Insurers, too, can profit by increasing hazards if it is the uninsured who suffer the exposure to risk. A classic example of an insurer's moral hazard is the temptation to parasitize a productive business by threatening it with destruction unless the owners pay regular "insurance premiums".

And that brings us to the morality of governance.

The most profound moral hazard for governance is the penal system combined with taxation.

The framers of the US Constitution included prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. They also made it difficult to parasitize productive States. This they did by requiring that taxation on a State's citizenry be proportional to the State's population under Article. 1. Section. 2. Clause 3. and Article. 1. Section. 9. Clause 4. Making taxes proportional to State population helps control the moral hazard of governance at the Federal level by making it difficult for the Federal government to transfer wealth to States that are politically active from States that are economically productive. Also, States are more capable of defending themselves from the Federal government than are individuals. Unfortunately, the requirement for taxation proportional to State population ("with apportionment" and "with regard to the census") was removed by the 16th Amendment, thereby promoting political porkbarrel at the Federal level and punishing productivity. In the same year the Federal Reserve Act gave license to gradually reduce legal tender's reliance on gold and silver as backing value, leaving the protection legal tender afforded against government punishment it's primary backing value. (Shortly thereafter, the 17th Amendment also removed from the States the power to elect Senators, further eroding the States' ability to protect their citizens from the federal government.)

These acts of treason have produced profound moral hazard at the Federal level, and set the stage for the relentless and radical decay of moral leadership during the 20th century.

WARRIOR INSURANCE

The proper role of government is protection against force and fraud. Therefore, to keep it honest, government's source of revenue should be insurance premiums against loss due to force and fraud. Said premiums could be payable in notes issued by the insurer/protector, but the insurer/protector should merely cancel the insurance policy and cease protecting those who do not pay. An insurer/protector should not generate the market for their own notes by threatening to punish those who do not pay -- as that is a protection racket, even if the insurer/protector honorably indemnifies those who do pay in the event of a covered loss. Such insurance premiums and corresponding insurance coverage would, necessarily, stipulate other conditions under which the insurance/protection continued to be provided at the agreed upon rates. This amounts to taxation on asset value, adjusted for various conditions that may affect risk -- with the added guarantee of indemnification in the event that asset value is lost due to force or fraud.

Such a system actually eliminates governance, as we know it. I call it "warrior insurance".

Under warrior insurance, reinsurance networks take the place of existing international treaties and alliances. Intelligent warrior reinsurance networks will check loss of asset value resulting from gang, or "protection racket" formation well in advance of any need for warfare. Warrior insurance premiums eliminate taxation. Competition between warrior insurance companies creates checks and balances supporting liberty. Formation of mass armies on ideological/political grounds is suppressed by exposing the underlying quid-pro-quo of reciprocal altruism that actually exists between people and their sovereignties -- over-extended kin identification, the basis of political and religious warfare as well as one-world ideology, is rendered less viable. Warrior insurance companies are much like the original sovereignties that defended newly formed civilizations -- they are, in fact, quite traditional. Empires subsumed the original sovereignties because trade, communication and literacy were so centralized. In the information age, this is decreasingly the case. What is increasingly necessary is a strong, distributed militia living lives bonded to their communities and lands from generation to generation, who value honor above their own lives. Unlike systems of taxation, warrior insurers will compensate those who are bonded for conscription in time of war, or deputized in times of civil emergency. Those so bonded would naturally demand a vote, or representation, in declarations of war or civil emergency.

Under warrior insurance, the citizens' militias traditionally enjoy tax relief, since they are in effect, protecting themselves. In Scotland, rather than forming a Yeoman class from the "kindly tenants", "feu fees" were imposed to pay for foreign war debts during the Protestant Reformation, thereby dispossessing ancient families of their lands to make way for revenue generating land use such as wool-producing sheep. Kindly tenants were kindred or clan members who had traditionally been given relief from economic rent/taxation in exchange for sworn allegiance to their clans' militias under the command of their chiefs. But the clan chiefs were corrupted by the royalty which had become more interested foreign adventures than they were in allowing the clans to support and protect themselves and their families on their own lands. The royal war debts began consuming the livelihoods of the folk. Many were forced to flee for their lives. This was the primary origin of the Scotch-Irish pioneers who attempted to create a society in "the New World", free from such betrayals of clan loyalty. The earliest pioneers suffered a 25% mortality rate in the first year of migration in their desperation to create that "New World". This was not merely the moral equivalent of war -- it was death on a massive scale in a struggle with nature herself (war with natives was not the primary cause of these deaths), on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. As usual mostly men went to the frontier to risk everything for their new lands, but many women and children also suffered similar fates. As a consequence, the founders of the United States, folk memory still fresh, thought the avoidance of foreign wars to be common sense. This gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and the avoidance of foreign wars.

Compare and contrast such a system to the internationally adventurous protection racket posing as a government we have today.


THE MURDEROUS, SEXUALLY SADISTIC BASIS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Forget the Clothes --The Emperor is a Murdering Rapist Run Amok

Many critics of President Clinton accused him of being a murdering rapist. But President Clinton was simply the by-product of an epic perversion that has overtaken the lawful government of the United States. It would be understatement to call this perversion a criminal gang. Criminal gangs only occasionally commit rape and murder against their own community. They don't pretend to be a lawful authorities in public. They don't issue their own currency as protection racket money and then demand it as "legal tender". They may rationalize their criminal conduct, but they don't convince themselves that what they are doing is lawful. They admit to themselves that they are gangsters. At least they are that honest. But, perhaps this is simply because gangsters are afraid to compete with the most massive criminal organization in history, whose roots extend back at least to 1913 when the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.

The Federal Reserve was created in the same year as the Income Tax for one simple reason:

The US Federal Government was shifting from Reward to Punishment Protection as the basis for its monetary authority.

Federal Reserve Notes are promises to reduce the bearer's risk of punishment for tax code violation, upon presentation to its collection agency, the IRS, in the form of Income Tax.

Note here that it is impossible to reduce the risk of punishment for violation of the income tax code to a level commensurate to the threat of prisoner gang-rape(5). This has become the foundation of the IRS/Fed's all-pervasive aura of fear(6) upon which their punishment protection money is based. The Income tax code is so complex that not even the IRS with all its private contractors from law and accounting firms, can reliably and reproducibly interpret it. This makes it possible only to _reduce_ the risk of punishment -- no matter how much wealth you turn over to the IRS.

In this manner the federal government creates demand for the Federal Reserve's otherwise worthless paper(7). Under the evil monetary basis of punishment protection, the government's monetary authority is limited only by the degree to which it can create pervasive terror of its prison system in the hearts of nonviolent potential tax code "offenders" -- and that means you.

With punishment protection as the basis of its monetary authority, and therefore its ability to buy votes, it was only a matter of time before the US Federal Government, as though an animal trained by operant conditioning, would find ways of increasing the severity and cruelty of its punishments.

But like rat in a maze, the US Federal Government had a problem to solve:

How to impose cruel and unusual punishment without arousing the wrath of a people whose ancestors had risked a 1 in 4 chance of dying in the first year of migration to the New World in order to escape just such evils?

The solution, reached without conscious intent (conspiracy) of individuals was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual -- SO TABOO -- that no decent human being would even want to think about it, let alone use freedom of speech and the press to talk about it:

Gradually cultivate prisoner rape as the basis of government authority.

By replacing pillory, open corporeal punishments and work restitution, so common before the 20th century, with an environment in which Mafiosi and other gangster types are protected from prisoner rape while the American pioneer cultures, less prone to prison gang formation, are systemically gang-raped, an ethnic bias was created against the very peoples who founded the country to escape government predation. The actual bias is apparent as at least 3 out of 4 prisoner rapes involve blacks victimizing men of Protestant heritage while Mediterranean Mafiosi are somehow immune.

The ruthlessly pragmatic and sadistically sociopathic genius of this is that its very intensity, both as physical trauma and moral outrage, rendered it invisible.

Such is the mentality of the child molester who relies on the traumatic nature of his crime to cover his tracks -- seemingly unable to control his subconscious urges. Such was the mentality of those men who, in 1913, gave us the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax.

CONCLUSION

As with a molested child whose shame and guilt compound his trauma, so the American people have come to accept as, as fated, a life lived with this filthy family secret(8). The US Federal Government, now basing its authority on cruel and unusual punishment, cannot be considered legitimate by any reasonable man . The fundamental role that the application of force against citizens plays in defining legitimacy demands such a radical conclusion.

Warrior insurance will be a crucial tool in the triumph of honor over the political will that has so corrupted the rule of law. But honorable warriors need something to protect. Pioneers risk their lives creating new lands. Women then risk their lives giving birth to new folk. Finally, warriors risk their lives protecting their lands and their folk.

The burden of leadership falls, as it did after the feu fees that so motivated the Scotch-Irish, on pioneers.

The dilemma, facing those of us who value the heritage of those early Americans who risked so much to escape sadistic authority in the old world, is not whether we are willing to risk our lives for freedom from such tyranny, but whether we can pioneer a 'New World' where our love of freedom can bear fruit in the face of death.

References

(1) This is a consequence of the unlawful declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender". "Legal tender" is called such because courts are required to accept it as money for legal purposes (by far, the largest legal purpose of money is payment of taxes). The US Constitution, under Article 1, Section 10 requires the States to use only gold and silver as payment for legally recognized debts. Article 1, section 8 does not give Congress power to make legal tender. Therefore, the declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender for all debts public and private" is unlawful. The best counter arguments to this generally ignore the fact that the paper currency issued by the original central banks were presumed to not be backed by legal tender's value as protection against punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment.

(2) See http://www.spr.org/docs/stats.html

(3) The "Scared Straight" program from the 1970s is still going strong as evidenced by this April 5, 1997 article from the Lubbock Avalance- Journal: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040697/prison.ht m

An excerpt:

"DALLAS (AP) - A grand jury has refused to indict prison inmates in connection
with a ''scared straight'' prison visit during which several boys claimed to have been molested."

(4) Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following public statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

(5) Look at the classic paper on the value of human life by Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago School of Business. He measured the effect of danger on wage rates in different professions. Prison is more of a danger in some lines of activity than others. We should be able to apply similar analytic techniques to the relationship between taxation and the prison system.

(6) "Prison Rape: Every Man's Greatest Fear", August 1995, Penthouse.

(7) Although the thesis of this paper does not necessarily predict it, an increase in the rate of prisoner suicide negatively correlating with the rate of inflation would be supportive.

(8) A final anecdote on silence: When the author of this white paper was called in for an audit by the IRS in 1994, he sought a tax attorney to represent him. During an interview with a prospective attorney the author told the attorney he thought the audit might have been politically motivated. When asked for details, the author related that the author had published articles on the Internet advocating a judical review of the legitimacy of the ratification of the 16th Amendment about one month prior to the notice of audit. The attorney then told the author that he could not represent the author. According to this tax attorney, he had attended a seminar given by the IRS in which the distinct impression was given that "tax protesters" were not to be defended and that any attorney who defended a "tax protester" would be subjected to a lifetime of audits. This was later confirmed during an interaction with a prominent southern California tax attorney when it became known that the IRS auditor had verbally admitted to his consulting accountant that the author was being audited because of his advocacy of a judicial review of the 16th Amendment's ratification.

In a related situation currently ongoing in China, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Practitioners in North America has stated that: "lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda." The U.S. House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 1999-NOV-18 and 19 which criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong.

• Handhelds have smaller displays, less memory and are put to different uses than desktop or notebook PCs. Because of this, porting over a desktop OS to a handheld isn't always the great idea that it originally seems - Windows CE anyone?

Windows CE (also known as Windows Powered * PC, where * is Pocket, Handheld, Auto, and Cell phone, and whatever else) is not a port of Windows (any version, 9x or NT). It's a complete rewrite from the ground up. The misconception comes from the fact that Windows CE supports a subset of the Win32 API (look around on MSDN sometime and you'll see a lot of functions that either aren't supported by CE or have limited functionality -- the goal was to reduce the number of APIs that have duplicate functionality).

Windows CE is actually very nice OS -- extremely modular, able to take advantage of several hardware platforms (MIPS, SH3/4, ARM, PPC, and x86), and written explicitly for embedded systems. Most people seem to dislike Windows CE (prior to Pocket PC, anyway) due to the clunky gui. What most people don't realize, though, is that it's not difficult for a development house to replace the gui with something nicer-looking (look at the AutoPC, for instance, or the Pocket PCs, which run Windows CE 3.0), thanks to the modular nature of Windows CE. For an interesting read about the origins of Windows CE, check out Inside Microsoft Windows CE (John Murray, Microsoft Press). It's a bit old (September 1998), but it gives a good account of how Windows CE was originally supposed to be a stripped down NT, but ended up being written from scratch.

It gets 100 miles per gallon and the exhaust smells like McDonald's fries.

That smell of McDonald's french fries is actually manufactured in a plant in New Jersey... like the matrix pulling the wool over people's eyes, the food this nation consumes is like "living in a dream world".

If you're interested in reading more about this, check out Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation"

sorry, link

I think the book is very good. Here is an interesting review of it: See only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read. In cyberspace, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. Cass Sunstein asks the questions, Is it good for democracy? Is it healthy for the republic? What does this mean for freedom of speech?" "Republic.com exposes the drawbacks of egocentric Internet use, while showing us how to approach the Internet as responsible citizens, not just concerned consumers. Democracy, Sunstein maintains, depends on shared experiences and requires citizens to be exposed to topics and ideas that they would not have chosen in advance. Newspapers and broadcasters helped create a shared culture, but as their role diminishes and the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities are in danger of dissolving. In their place will arise only louder and ever more extreme echoes of our own voices, our own opinions." "In evaluating the consequences of new communications technologies for democracy and free speech, Sunstein argues the question is not whether to regulate the Net (it's already regulated), but how; proves that freedom of speech is not an absolute; and underscores the enormous potential of the Internet to promote freedom as well as its potential to promote "cybercascades" of like-minded opinions that foster and inflame hate groups. The book ends by suggesting a range of potential reforms to current misconceptions and to improve deliberative democracy and the health of the American republic . If you are interested in the book you can read a chapter here

Federal Reserve + IRS = The Protection Racket Coup of 1913

by Jim Bowery
Jim Bowery, January 13, 2001 -- The author grants the right to copy, without modification.

INTRODUCTION

Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character. The transition to this form of money began in 1913, when the 16th Amendment dramatically expanded the potential need for legal tender in the form of taxes while, in that same year, the Federal Reserve Act started the process of removing from legal tender any backing value other than the protection it affords against punishment. That the redefinition of "legal tender" was unconstitutional(1) has become only a minor dimension of the massive decay in legitimacy and moral leadership during the 20th century triggered by these acts of 1913. These acts were largely in the interest of continental European banking concerns doing business under the name of J. P. Morgan. As vital interests of the United States were sacrificed on their behalf, those foreign interests are reasonably called "enemies of the United States", the acts of U.S. citizens on their behalf "treasons", and all such citizens "traitors".

THE MORAL HAZARD OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY

Legitimate governments provide assurance that we are secure in our lives and properties by protecting our legal rights in exchange for taxes and other duties. The most legitimate governments will even back up their commitment by providing some sort of compensation if our legal rights are breached, much the same as insurance companies do when they pay out on an insurance policy. But there is a fine line between protection rackets and insurance companies. Indeed, gangsters frequently call their protection rackets "insurance" and the payments they extort from their victims "insurance premiums". That fine line between protector and protection racket is crossed when "moral hazard" tempts the "protector" beyond the limits of his character.

In conventional insurance terminology, "moral hazard" is the temptation to artificially increase hazards. A classic case of moral hazard is an otherwise unprofitable business buying lots of fire insurance and then hiring an arsonist to burn down the place of business.

Insurers, too, can profit by increasing hazards if it is the uninsured who suffer the exposure to risk. A classic example of an insurer's moral hazard is the temptation to parasitize a productive business by threatening it with destruction unless the owners pay regular "insurance premiums".

And that brings us to the morality of governance.

The most profound moral hazard for governance is the penal system combined with taxation.

The framers of the US Constitution included prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. They also made it difficult to parasitize productive States. This they did by requiring that taxation on a State's citizenry be proportional to the State's population under Article. 1. Section. 2. Clause 3. and Article. 1. Section. 9. Clause 4. Making taxes proportional to State population helps control the moral hazard of governance at the Federal level by making it difficult for the Federal government to transfer wealth to States that are politically active from States that are economically productive. Also, States are more capable of defending themselves from the Federal government than are individuals. Unfortunately, the requirement for taxation proportional to State population ("with apportionment" and "with regard to the census") was removed by the 16th Amendment, thereby promoting political porkbarrel at the Federal level and punishing productivity. In the same year the Federal Reserve Act gave license to gradually reduce legal tender's reliance on gold and silver as backing value, leaving the protection legal tender afforded against government punishment it's primary backing value. (Shortly thereafter, the 17th Amendment also removed from the States the power to elect Senators, further eroding the States' ability to protect their citizens from the federal government.)

These acts of treason have produced profound moral hazard at the Federal level, and set the stage for the relentless and radical decay of moral leadership during the 20th century.

WARRIOR INSURANCE

The proper role of government is protection against force and fraud. Therefore, to keep it honest, government's source of revenue should be insurance premiums against loss due to force and fraud. Said premiums could be payable in notes issued by the insurer/protector, but the insurer/protector should merely cancel the insurance policy and cease protecting those who do not pay. An insurer/protector should not generate the market for their own notes by threatening to punish those who do not pay -- as that is a protection racket, even if the insurer/protector honorably indemnifies those who do pay in the event of a covered loss. Such insurance premiums and corresponding insurance coverage would, necessarily, stipulate other conditions under which the insurance/protection continued to be provided at the agreed upon rates. This amounts to taxation on asset value, adjusted for various conditions that may affect risk -- with the added guarantee of indemnification in the event that asset value is lost due to force or fraud.

Such a system actually eliminates governance, as we know it. I call it "warrior insurance".

Under warrior insurance, reinsurance networks take the place of existing international treaties and alliances. Intelligent warrior reinsurance networks will check loss of asset value resulting from gang, or "protection racket" formation well in advance of any need for warfare. Warrior insurance premiums eliminate taxation. Competition between warrior insurance companies creates checks and balances supporting liberty. Formation of mass armies on ideological/political grounds is suppressed by exposing the underlying quid-pro-quo of reciprocal altruism that actually exists between people and their sovereignties -- over-extended kin identification, the basis of political and religious warfare as well as one-world ideology, is rendered less viable. Warrior insurance companies are much like the original sovereignties that defended newly formed civilizations -- they are, in fact, quite traditional. Empires subsumed the original sovereignties because trade, communication and literacy were so centralized. In the information age, this is decreasingly the case. What is increasingly necessary is a strong, distributed militia living lives bonded to their communities and lands from generation to generation, who value honor above their own lives. Unlike systems of taxation, warrior insurers will compensate those who are bonded for conscription in time of war, or deputized in times of civil emergency. Those so bonded would naturally demand a vote, or representation, in declarations of war or civil emergency.

Under warrior insurance, the citizens' militias traditionally enjoy tax relief, since they are in effect, protecting themselves. In Scotland, rather than forming a Yeoman class from the "kindly tenants", "feu fees" were imposed to pay for foreign war debts during the Protestant Reformation, thereby dispossessing ancient families of their lands to make way for revenue generating land use such as wool-producing sheep. Kindly tenants were kindred or clan members who had traditionally been given relief from economic rent/taxation in exchange for sworn allegiance to their clans' militias under the command of their chiefs. But the clan chiefs were corrupted by the royalty which had become more interested foreign adventures than they were in allowing the clans to support and protect themselves and their families on their own lands. The royal war debts began consuming the livelihoods of the folk. Many were forced to flee for their lives. This was the primary origin of the Scotch-Irish pioneers who attempted to create a society in "the New World", free from such betrayals of clan loyalty. The earliest pioneers suffered a 25% mortality rate in the first year of migration in their desperation to create that "New World". This was not merely the moral equivalent of war -- it was death on a massive scale in a struggle with nature herself (war with natives was not the primary cause of these deaths), on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. As usual mostly men went to the frontier to risk everything for their new lands, but many women and children also suffered similar fates. As a consequence, the founders of the United States, folk memory still fresh, thought the avoidance of foreign wars to be common sense. This gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and the avoidance of foreign wars.

Compare and contrast such a system to the internationally adventurous protection racket posing as a government we have today.


THE MURDEROUS, SEXUALLY SADISTIC BASIS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

> Forget the Clothes --The Emperor is a Murdering Rapist Run Amok

Many critics of President Clinton accused him of being a murdering rapist. But President Clinton was simply the by-product of an epic perversion that has overtaken the lawful government of the United States. It would be understatement to call this perversion a criminal gang. Criminal gangs only occasionally commit rape and murder against their own community. They don't pretend to be a lawful authorities in public. They don't issue their own currency as protection racket money and then demand it as "legal tender". They may rationalize their criminal conduct, but they don't convince themselves that what they are doing is lawful. They admit to themselves that they are gangsters. At least they are that honest. But, perhaps this is simply because gangsters are afraid to compete with the most massive criminal organization in history, whose roots extend back at least to 1913 when the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.

The Federal Reserve was created in the same year as the Income Tax for one simple reason:

The US Federal Government was shifting from Reward to Punishment Protection as the basis for its monetary authority.

Federal Reserve Notes are promises to reduce the bearer's risk of punishment for tax code violation, upon presentation to its collection agency, the IRS, in the form of Income Tax.

Note here that it is impossible to reduce the risk of punishment for violation of the income tax code to a level commensurate to the threat of prisoner gang-rape(5). This has become the foundation of the IRS/Fed's all-pervasive aura of fear(6) upon which their punishment protection money is based. The Income tax code is so complex that not even the IRS with all its private contractors from law and accounting firms, can reliably and reproducibly interpret it. This makes it possible only to _reduce_ the risk of punishment -- no matter how much wealth you turn over to the IRS.

In this manner the federal government creates demand for the Federal Reserve's otherwise worthless paper(7). Under the evil monetary basis of punishment protection, the government's monetary authority is limited only by the degree to which it can create pervasive terror of its prison system in the hearts of nonviolent potential tax code "offenders" -- and that means you.

With punishment protection as the basis of its monetary authority, and therefore its ability to buy votes, it was only a matter of time before the US Federal Government, as though an animal trained by operant conditioning, would find ways of increasing the severity and cruelty of its punishments.

But like rat in a maze, the US Federal Government had a problem to solve:

How to impose cruel and unusual punishment without arousing the wrath of a people whose ancestors had risked a 1 in 4 chance of dying in the first year of migration to the New World in order to escape just such evils?

The solution, reached without conscious intent (conspiracy) of individuals was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual -- SO TABOO -- that no decent human being would even want to think about it, let alone use freedom of speech and the press to talk about it:

Gradually cultivate prisoner rape as the basis of government authority.

By replacing pillory, open corporeal punishments and work restitution, so common before the 20th century, with an environment in which Mafiosi and other gangster types are protected from prisoner rape while the American pioneer cultures, less prone to prison gang formation, are systemically gang-raped, an ethnic bias was created against the very peoples who founded the country to escape government predation. The actual bias is apparent as at least 3 out of 4 prisoner rapes involve blacks victimizing men of Protestant heritage while Mediterranean Mafiosi are somehow immune.

The ruthlessly pragmatic and sadistically sociopathic genius of this is that its very intensity, both as physical trauma and moral outrage, rendered it invisible.

Such is the mentality of the child molester who relies on the traumatic nature of his crime to cover his tracks -- seemingly unable to control his subconscious urges. Such was the mentality of those men who, in 1913, gave us the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax.

CONCLUSION

As with a molested child whose shame and guilt compound his trauma, so the American people have come to accept as, as fated, a life lived with this filthy family secret(8). The US Federal Government, now basing its authority on cruel and unusual punishment, cannot be considered legitimate by any reasonable man . The fundamental role that the application of force against citizens plays in defining legitimacy demands such a radical conclusion.

Warrior insurance will be a crucial tool in the triumph of honor over the political will that has so corrupted the rule of law. But honorable warriors need something to protect. Pioneers risk their lives creating new lands. Women then risk their lives giving birth to new folk. Finally, warriors risk their lives protecting their lands and their folk.

The burden of leadership falls, as it did after the feu fees that so motivated the Scotch-Irish, on pioneers.

The dilemma, facing those of us who value the heritage of those early Americans who risked so much to escape sadistic authority in the old world, is not whether we are willing to risk our lives for freedom from such tyranny, but whether we can pioneer a 'New World' where our love of freedom can bear fruit in the face of death.

References

(1) This is a consequence of the unlawful declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender". "Legal tender" is called such because courts are required to accept it as money for legal purposes (by far, the largest legal purpose of money is payment of taxes). The US Constitution, under Article 1, Section 10 requires the States to use only gold and silver as payment for legally recognized debts. Article 1, section 8 does not give Congress power to make legal tender. Therefore, the declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender for all debts public and private" is unlawful. The best counter arguments to this generally ignore the fact that the paper currency issued by the original central banks were presumed to not be backed by legal tender's value as protection against punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment.

(2) See http://www.spr.org/docs/stats.html

(3) The "Scared Straight" program from the 1970s is still going strong as evidenced by this April 5, 1997 article from the Lubbock Avalance- Journal: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040697/prison.ht m

An excerpt:

"DALLAS (AP) - A grand jury has refused to indict prison inmates in connection
with a ''scared straight'' prison visit during which several boys claimed to have been molested."

(4) Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following public statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

(5) Look at the classic paper on the value of human life by Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago School of Business. He measured the effect of danger on wage rates in different professions. Prison is more of a danger in some lines of activity than others. We should be able to apply similar analytic techniques to the relationship between taxation and the prison system.

(6) "Prison Rape: Every Man's Greatest Fear", August 1995, Penthouse.

(7) Although the thesis of this paper does not necessarily predict it, an increase in the rate of prisoner suicide negatively correlating with the rate of inflation would be supportive.

(8) A final anecdote on silence: When the author of this white paper was called in for an audit by the IRS in 1994, he sought a tax attorney to represent him. During an interview with a prospective attorney the author told the attorney he thought the audit might have been politically motivated. When asked for details, the author related that the author had published articles on the Internet advocating a judical review of the legitimacy of the ratification of the 16th Amendment about one month prior to the notice of audit. The attorney then told the author that he could not represent the author. According to this tax attorney, he had attended a seminar given by the IRS in which the distinct impression was given that "tax protesters" were not to be defended and that any attorney who defended a "tax protester" would be subjected to a lifetime of audits. This was later confirmed during an interaction with a prominent southern California tax attorney when it became known that the IRS auditor had verbally admitted to his consulting accountant that the author was being audited because of his advocacy of a judicial review of the 16th Amendment's ratification.

In a related situation currently ongoing in China, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Practitioners in North America has stated that: "lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda." The U.S. House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 1999-NOV-18 and 19 which criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong.

It deals with the same theme and the sociological implications of an immortal "ruling class" in a gerontocracy?

A truly, truly superb story , set in the fifth millennium and based around a man born in 1912, is "Time Enough for Love", by Robert A. Heinlein. This may be one of the greatest works of fiction ever written.

• Startup, by Jerry Kaplan. A 1994 tale about pen-computing venture Go, and how it went through $75MM in capital before burning up -- as told by the CEO (!).
  
  
• aol.com, by Kara Swisher. If you don't want to assign the whole book, the second chapter (about the company's founding by an alcoholic, eccentric, self-destructive entrepreneur) is worth the price of admission alone.
  
  
• Good stuff, but not quite as compelling:
  • Netscape Time, by Jim Clark (with Owen Edwards). A fairly human and not-too-smug account of the company's glory years. (c) 1999, when the stock was still worth something.)
  • The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman. Written with flair and wit. Really about one specific person, though -- doesn't dwell on bigger insights on the industry.
  • High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems, by Karen Southwick. Too adoring. By pure coincidence, I did P.R. work for Sun (after this book was written), and knew some of the folks responsible for making it so... nice.
• Two books by Peter Salus: A Quarter Century of UNIX, and Casting the Net (foreword by Vint Cerf!). Excellent for highly technical audiences, next-to-useless for general audiences. Sorry, Peter. (Random fact: I was friends briefly with his daughter when we were in high school. I believe she still works at Linux Magazine.)

Good luck with the class! --Tom Geller

If you live in the Bay Area, a contemporary copy of the customs declaration (probably required in triplicate) can be seen on USS Hornet, the aircraft carrier (now a floating museum in Alameda) that hauled many of the Apollo capsules out of the Pacific and took them to Hawaii. It was clearly done as a tongue in cheek thing by US Customs, and possibly to cop a little reflected glamour from the moon shot.

Reminds me of something similar.

In the book Lost Moon, about the Apollo 13 mission, it says that the geeks at the contractor that built the lunar module sent the geeks at the contractor that built the (broken) command module an invoice, for towing charges, oxygen supplies, electrical power, etc.

> THERE ARE ALTERNATIVE MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHIES!

Conveniently priced at $146.50 ... for suckers. "Logic not necessary! Give me $150.00 and I'll show you why!"

- - - - -

Of course it has helped throw more doubt on the current popular foundations of mathematics, just as Godel, Church, and Turing threw doubt on the quality of our popular mathematical foundations.THERE ARE ALTERNATIVE MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHIES!

What you have just touched on is a philosophical issue. You for some reason believe in the Platonic idealism, that mathematical concepts exist independently of the mind. Without the existance of humans, you believe that mathematics still exists.

However, this belief has never been proven. It is nothing more than a belief, just like many people agree that their exists a God. Therefore, just as the belief in the existance of a God turns something into a religion; the belief in the Platonic idealism turns mathematics into a religion - rife with all of the problems associated with religions!

Great mathematicians such as L.E.J. Brouwer argued that such dogmatic beliefs should not be used within mathematics, because it causes horrible foundational problems of paradox, undecidability, and incompleteness. Brouwer went on to establish the mathematical philosophy of intuitionism, and then built an entire mathematical system ontop of that. In effect, he created mathematical intuitionism, just as each mathematician creates (or recreates depending on how you look at it) mathematical concepts in their mind.

The Platonic idealism has been a cancer on the foundation of mathematics for thousands of years. Please, stop and realize that the Platonic idealism is nothing more than a belief system, and witness how it has partially destroyed mathematics.
THERE ARE ALTERNATIVE MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHIES!

And so the great Scientology monolith smashes another dissenter.

Am I surprised?

Of course not. It seems that they use a vast proportion of their earnings (read: money ripped off from gullible/vulnerable people) to sue those who speak out against them.

Dave Touretzky (of the DeCSS descrambler gallery) has a lot of information available on these guys - somewhat more valuable, considering it's not in Swedish (what's with the link above, Michael? Please reply to this message, and tell me what percentage of the daily hits are from .se).

And I'd recommend reading Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller. Unfortunately, I can't find any online retailer still willing to sell this book - the link is to used copies of early, expensive editions.

For those who don't already know, an editor put together Feynman's lecture notes into a great book, which he used during his famous 1980s lectures. It's worth the $30, if you are interested in computers, computation theory, physics, or you just really like Feynman's stuff. This book is one of those classics that everyone has on their shelf.

Anyways Sony has always been pissed that they missed the computer revolution. Read the book We Were Burning to understand why. The PS and PS2 was Sony's answer to sneaking a home computer into everyone's house. While most don't see the PS or even the PS2 as a home computer, the PS3 will definitely fit the description.

With Sony's little machine in every living room of America, Sony could be set to revolutionize the home computer market. And Linux, being free for Sony, could be the catalyst to do just that.

Eventually we will see a "proprietary" Sony operating system that runs on the Linux kernel. Whether it is on PS2 or the next incarnation is yet too be seen. Believe me Sony has much bigger plans then just a game machine.

You're comparing one SMT CPU to two regular CPUs (on the same chip or not.)

Yes, but I'm assuming equal (or as near equal as is practically possible) execution resources.

So what's SMT good for? It doesn't cost nearly as much as two whole CPUs.

See, now that's where I disagree. In terms of raw transitors you are right. But you are forgetting the cost of design and slippage in time-to-market. It is less costly to design and fabricate an MP design from previously designed cores than it is to take such a core and modify it for SMT.

Realize that I am not saying this should never be done. Just that more evaluation is needed. Some of that evaluation will involve silicon, probably in the consumer market.

but relative to a single non-SMT CPU on the same amount of silicon, I think's a almost always a win.

If you look at raw transistor count, I might agree with you. I depends greatly on the architecture and the expense of the duplicated vs. shared resources of the two designs (decode logic, etc.). SMT has a cycle time impact and you have to balance that against the extra transistors required for a CMP.

You add more of everything else, and share the execution units.

This is an argument I've never understood. The execution units are such a tiny, tiny part of the die that I don't see much benefit in sharing them. Sharing the decode/O-O-O logic seems more beneficial, but even an SMT requires more of that (in terms of bandwidth).

Decode is pretty much trivial on anything but an IA32.

Sure about that? The POWER architecture is pretty complex. Even on a MIPS-like machine, the rename and dependency logic complexity rises rapidly with fetch/issue width. As does the wakeup logic with larger instruction windows.

ILP and scheduling have everything to do with cycle time. You can trade off one to get the other, and have a CPU that gets the job done in the same amount of time.

Time = instructions * CPI * clock period

So raising the clock speed (smaller clock period) has the same effect as decreasing the average number of cycles per instruction (more ILP).

My point is that raising ILP with SMT can decrease the clock speed (increase the cycle time). So you get more ILP but everything runs more slowly. A CMP with an equivalent number of contexts should get the same ILP without the extra cycle time penalty (ignoring messaging and coherence overhead). SMT does not make any one thread run faster. It increases throughput, which is exactly what a CMP does.

Pipelining is not a panacea, either. There is a limit to how deep you want to make your pipe. This is one of the reasons good branch prediction is so important -- it allows a longer pipe.

Remember also that cycle time is pretty much the only thing companies have to market, everything else (i.e. number of threads) being equal. Is this unfortunate? Clearly. But it is reality and engineers need to deal with it when making design decisions. Which reminds me to plug the excellent book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, a fascinating account of Data General's race to kill the VAX. There's a bit of discussion devoted to market times and perfect designs.

Two small windows on two threads will find more instructions to run than one large window on one thread.

A CMP has two small(er) windows for two threads. An SMT has one big window for two threads. Two smaller windows should run faster. Whether they find more ILP is an open question. SMT does have the advantage that it can trade off window space, etc. between threads. I think this is more difficult to do than most people realize due to the challenges with fetch policy.

In any event, I am extremely curious to see what happens with the SMT chips coming out. Let's sit back and see if they make it! :)

--

While everyone continues to use software that is in it's 19th beta stage, buggy and unfinished, I can use a very stable commercial product (say, IE for example) that performs well

Not if your computer doesn't have an x86 processor. In that case, you'd need an emulator plus a copy of Windows (USD $320). Even if you are running on an x86, you need a virtualizer ($300) plus Windows. Isn't $600 a bit steep for a web browser? Might as well just pay for Opera.

What's that rule in software development? Something like, adding more members to a project team makes the project later. Or to put it another way, too many cooks in the kitchen...

Spoil the broth. See also The Mythical Man-Month.

It is more difficult to develop a sense for this when considering non-text input. It is more difficult to see how it could work when using modern cyphers. But the principles are the same.

Any particular type of message will have some standard formatting information, some patterns that the cryptanalyst can look for. The modern, popular, RC4 stream cipher does have a perceptable bias in the stream of numbers produced. So hope is not lost with modern cyphers.

• Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus by Andre LaMothe
• 3D Game Programming With C++ by John De Goes

--
Spelling by m-w.com.

• Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus by Andre LaMothe
• 3D Game Programming With C++ by John De Goes

--
Spelling by m-w.com.

I should have included this with the last email... These are awesome links.

First, some from electric sheep, a very socially conscious, interesting, and humerous collection of comics.

• The Guy I Almost Was - everyone who works with technology and OpenSource/Free Software should read this, to get a sense of how some of our idealistic roots came.
• Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything - Rush Limbaugh does Reality shows, and decides to eat... The LAST Spotted Owl.
• The Jain's Death - An insightful and beautiful story on a Jain's lives.
• Overheard at a Rave - A cute story about a daughter who takes her father to a rave with her.

Here are two Scott McCloud links. Scott McClouds greatest works, unfortunately, are not online: Understanding Comics, and Reinventing Comics. Get them at a comic store near you, or at BarnesAndNoble.com. Here's some of his online work, which are of exceptional quality:

• I Can't Stop Thinking! A meta-comic, also by Scott McCloud. Very interesting ideas are expressed here.
• Scott McCloud's "Hearts And Minds" - not my favorite online comic, but a good taste of Scott McCloud's web form, doing things that could *NEVER* have been done in print. (Such as the falling scene in Week 3.)

Finally, Unicorn Jelly, for those who love science, mathematics, and anime. Be sure to check out the alternative time lines, and the powers of ten map of the universe of tryslmaistan.

I would like to recommend a book that demonstrates the beauty of creativity. It's a book about a mathematician, an artist, and a musician... or, that is at least one way of looking at it. Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid weaves together the works of three creative individuals, demonstrating through example, that the things commoningly known as mathematics, art, music - they all share the same beauty. With a second glance, the book is about three mathematicians, or three artists, or three musicians, or any combination thereof!

Anyway, this book is very common. You can find it at your library, or you can buy your own copy for $18. It is worth your time, money, effort! If you are a programmer, an engineer, a mathematician... a musician, and/or an artist, this book will make great bedtime reading.

While I miss Bloom County, if Berkeley continues writing childrens books like these I'll be happy :)

... But Berkeley Breathed will also forever be known in my home for writing quite possibly the best Christmas story ever published (and possibly also the best children's story):

The Red Ranger Came Calling.

This book belongs in every library children have access to.

Actually, they do not succeed at all - they are too probable. However, when you get to one in a trillion-something chance (I am not sure about the exact numbers), the improbability drives start kicking in, and everything happens to be just fine! If you disagree, reread the Hitchhiker's guide!!!
---------------------------------------- ---------

I fail to see the true distinction between the mental construct of natural numbers and other mental constructs. They are all mental constructs that may or may not reflect the true nature of the physical world.

But if it has definable characteristics within a mathematical system, then it is part of mathematics!

(No, not the Greg Bear story)
I'm just wandering, since we are hoping to colonize Mars someday, why not try to move it a bit closer to the sun, so it would be easier to terraform it?

Yeah, it is cool, but you're a couple decades too late :-). Colin Fletcher, while revising The Complete Walker for what would become The Complete Walker III, writes in the intro (IIRC) that he tried to sell his publisher on calling it The Pre-antepenultimate Complete Walker. I'm still waiting for the antepenultimate edition.

I'm wondering what the Slashdot community thinks this would do to Apple, would it adversely affect their hardware sales?

I think it would effect Apple's hardware sales if they were to produce OS X for x86 platform. I suppose the true answer really lies within a book called In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. Despite the worries I think Apple (Steve) should consider the possibility seriously. Right now Apple is hurting because their CPUs are having trouble keeping up with Intel. Their highest clocked PPC chip runs at 733MHz while P4 runs at 1.5GHz. I'd assume everyone knows that clock speed isn't everything but I think average consumer who buys computer at CompUSA doesn't know jack comparing RISC and CISC (some RISC though). Apple's hardware isn't looking very good because of this speed gap. OS X on x86 would solve this problem.

We asked earlier whether you felt if Linux would be threatened by OS X, with the possibility of OS X working on x86 machines, has your answer changed?

This is two-part question. Answer would be No and mostly No. Is Linux threatened on the server side? I doubt that. The Open Source aspect of Linux is key strength in this area. Is Linux threatened on the client desktop side? I would say mostly no. Very slightly yes if you are talking sheer install base. I think the idea of having a powerful, stable, nice looking, user-friendly desktop is good thing. It may initially steal some market share from GNOME, KDE and such. However this can mean a very good thing for desktop side of Linux. It's lot easier to port applications from OS X (x86) to Linux (x86) than OS X (PPC) to Linux (x86). It's very unlikely that commercial software vendors will port OS X (PPC) to Linux (PPC) due to low demand. It would also be interesting to see Linux app ported over to OS X as well.

He called it "The Second System of Man", and one of the tenets was "The Second System is Fat and Slow".

Buy it at Barnes & Noble if you like.

Don't get me started on this! ...Too late!
If I could design the curriculum of a CS degree, it would throw out the mostly useless mathematics (at least to CS majors), such as "Calculus", and replace it with lambda-calculus, intuitionistic logic, and automata theory. I would probably have Kleene's classic book "Introduction to Metamathematics" used as the core book of the course track. Also, introductory courses in mathematical philosophy would also be required.

The problem is that I believe in the importance of foundations for understanding... not notches on your resume.
Finally, let me repeat the importance of all CS students reading the notable mathematician's book: Introduction to Metamathematics by S.C. Kleene. Sure, most of the material that is covered in the book has most likely been covered in a combination of automata theory, logic theory, and descrete math text books, but never will you read a book with such insight. There is a reason that this computer science book has been in print for about 50 years now.
Truth lasts forever.

Look up "Amusing ourselves to Death" a book by Neil Postman

Ever thought we may end up like Wells' Eloi?

Or as an enslaved, mindless, soma phreak like in Huxley's Brave New World? (the McCarthy inspired Anti-Communist undertones will DEFINATLEY not be part of that future)

More like a quote in a book I read recently (Fawcett's Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow... to quote (loosely) He went on for a few pages about how "all through time 'would-be' oppressors/tyrants/dictators/kings/priests/etc have tried to enslave the 'average' person. And every time he learns that a slave's output (production) is lower - that the level of oppression is inversely proportional to his output. 'Slaves' will always find a way to do little work - while just doing enough to keep themselves from being killed (you cant kill all your slaves for poor performance)" He then later went on to say "God help us if someone finds a way to prove history untrue - meaning a way to make enslaved people want to work harder". When he said that I literally shuddered - I thought " Oh Crap - I think they have.".

When I look around at what all our discoveries, technology and culture has 'culminated' to - and what our 'direction' and goals (which we really have none) it was like being kicked in the chest - I spent 3 days relating this too friends and family (who mostly think Im a lunatic ("Your too serious, relax, take it easy" is commonly their reply))

Think about the way we relate to one another (through popular media), the consumerism, the blindly shallow culture (there is virtually nothing outside of 'pop' culture), and the way that we encourage and reward this behavior. That anything outside of entertaining ourselves and indulging ourselves has been forgotten. Im not suggesting we all have to live like martyrs and such, but it looks like we've become too complacent to adjust our culture to respond to anything of any real value...

Am I really supposed to give a fucking shit about Tommy Hilfiger, Monica Lewinsky, Jim Carrey's love life, or what Leonardo Decaprio eats for breakfast?

This book makes no assumptions about your physics acumen, and the explanation of relativity is one of the best I have read - it is accessible to almost anyone with a high-school level education.

As a personal rule, I do not accept telephone solicitation. For many, filtration software is a needed tool for communication sanity. Too often, the Attention Market has you at a disadvantage, ready to commit you to a purchase, legally obligating you to a recorded whisper of "okay." Meanwhile, you often have no such record of their verbal promises, if you have need of committing them to rendering services. And while Spam on email at least gives you written record, the company's credentials are often every-bit-as-nebulous.

If nothing guarantees success like having Human Attention lavished on a project, then does Love indeed make the world go around?

next thing we'll see is a "linux for dummies" series..

<kw>
You mean like Debian for Dummies, Slackware for Dummies, SuSE for Dummies, and Red Hat 7 for Dummies? What about GNOME for Dummies and KDE for Dummies? Or Linux Programming for Dummies?
</kw>

next thing we'll see is a "linux for dummies" series..

<kw>
You mean like Debian for Dummies, Slackware for Dummies, SuSE for Dummies, and Red Hat 7 for Dummies? What about GNOME for Dummies and KDE for Dummies? Or Linux Programming for Dummies?
</kw>

next thing we'll see is a "linux for dummies" series..

<kw>
You mean like Debian for Dummies, Slackware for Dummies, SuSE for Dummies, and Red Hat 7 for Dummies? What about GNOME for Dummies and KDE for Dummies? Or Linux Programming for Dummies?
</kw>

next thing we'll see is a "linux for dummies" series..

<kw>
You mean like Debian for Dummies, Slackware for Dummies, SuSE for Dummies, and Red Hat 7 for Dummies? What about GNOME for Dummies and KDE for Dummies? Or Linux Programming for Dummies?
</kw>

next thing we'll see is a "linux for dummies" series..

<kw>
You mean like Debian for Dummies, Slackware for Dummies, SuSE for Dummies, and Red Hat 7 for Dummies? What about GNOME for Dummies and KDE for Dummies? Or Linux Programming for Dummies?
</kw>

next thing we'll see is a "linux for dummies" series..

<kw>
You mean like Debian for Dummies, Slackware for Dummies, SuSE for Dummies, and Red Hat 7 for Dummies? What about GNOME for Dummies and KDE for Dummies? Or Linux Programming for Dummies?
</kw>

next thing we'll see is a "linux for dummies" series..

<kw>
You mean like Debian for Dummies, Slackware for Dummies, SuSE for Dummies, and Red Hat 7 for Dummies? What about GNOME for Dummies and KDE for Dummies? Or Linux Programming for Dummies?
</kw>