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There are a lot of very good schools that let lots of people in but still manage to graduate a decent proportion of their students. Mine was a pretty common story: at 18 I "went off to college" at my nearby Enormous State University (University of Colorado in my case) and partied all the time, ended up with a crappy GPA my first semester, dropped out and spent a few years in the service, then came back with a much more mature attitude and a determination to do better. The problem was that CU didn't want me back (I mean, my GPA was really bad.) So I did my BS at Metropolitan State College of Denver, which admits just about anyone with a pulse, but still maintains high educational standards. It cost me a lot less than CU or CSU would have, too.

Did it work? Well, I'm back at CU now ... working on my PhD and supported by an NIH fellowship. It worked for most of my classmates, too, many of whom had hard-luck stories like mine. I don't know where we'd be if we'd decided to go the UofP route, but I'm guessing most of us would be a lot worse off, educationally and financially, than we are now.

UofP's problem isn't low admission standards. Its problem is that it's a moneymaking machine run by vultures who prey on desperate people.

Why don't they just do a Cray 4 on a chip?

... except there are plenty of men in biology. You may see biology as a "girly" subject, but I guarantee you male biologists don't.

Look, not only are fewer women starting CS programs, their dropout rates are higher than for men -- about the only academic track for which this is true. There is obviously a real problem here.

There will probably always be more female interior decorators than (straight) male, and more male mechanics than female. Fine. I buy that. But CS is, by its nature, pretty gender-neutral; it doesn't really fit into the stereotypes for either sex except the one that says, "Boys like computers and girls don't," which is a circular argument.

I've said this before, but part of the reason I don't buy that stereotype is because at both the school where I got my Bachelor's degree in math and the school where I'm currently studying for my Master's in CS, the math and CS programs have a mujch higher ratio of female to male students than most schools do -- about 50/50 in the first case, 40/60 in the second -- and the levels of satisfaction with, and completion of, the program seem to be about equal among students of both sexes.

Why is that? Well, I suspect that the main reason is that both schools are located on a commuter campus that caters largely to working adults. We're not talking about boys and girls here; we're talking about men and women. The average undergrad age is late twenties, and average grad student age is thirty or so; these are people who have moved past stupid stereotypes like "girls don't like computers" or (for both sexes) "smart isn't sexy."

I think this is exactly the types of classes needed out there.

For all the people who know nothing of issues like electronic voting, DMCA, Elrdrid v. Ashcroft, the hardest thing was to get the idea out to non-computer folk. Raising awareness of complex technical issues is usually next to impossible, and this is a great start.

A professor at my school wrote a language called jboxes, it has the same basic design as java- it is a actually some sort of extention to java but all the programming is done using a gui where boxes are moved around and connections added. I myself have never used it but it looks neat, he gave a class that I was in a demo shortly after he finished. It looked like it might have helped me in some of my first cs classes, although I did not have that much trouble.

Anyway the point of creating Jboxes was to help students who had trouble with OOP and writing code, Jboxes takes away the problems of syntax to help new cs students understand the structure of programming and think of the design instead of getting hung up on syntax problems.

I could not seem to find a page dedicated to jboxes on his website but he does have the executables and pdf files(for his classes) at http://clem.mscd.edu/~shultzj/190kf02/

• PuTTY is an SSH1+SSH2 implementation. PSCP, an scp-style program for Windows, is also available.

  PuTTY is available under the MIT licence (BSD-like).

  "PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 platforms, written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham, who lives in Great Britain."

• TTSSH (SSH1) is an SSH1-only implementation, by Robert O'Callahan.

  "TTSSH is a free SSH client for Windows. It is implemented as an extension DLL for Teraterm Pro. Teraterm Pro is a superb free terminal emulator/telnet client for Windows, and its source is available. TTSSH adds SSH capabilities to Teraterm Pro without sacrificing any of Teraterm's existing functionality. TTSSH is also free to download and use and its source is available too, with an open source license. Furthermore, TTSSH has been developed entirely in Australia [...]."

• Cygwin (POSIX software on top of Windows)

  OpenSSH (SSH1 and SSH2 protocol) with Cygwin can run on Windows using the portable version of OpenSSH.

• MSSH

  MSSH from the Metropolitan State College of Denver supports Windows 95 and Windows 98, supporting SSH1 protocol.

• OpenSSH for Windows

  Another OpenSSH running on top of Windows..

• Secure iXplorer

  Secure iXplorer is graphical front end to PuTTY's pscp.exe.

• WinSCP

  WinSCP is a scp(1) program for Windows, with PuTTY integrated into it.

• NiftyTelnet 1.1 SSH is an SSH1-only implementation which comes with a scp-style program. Written by Jonas Wallden.

  "NiftyTelnet 1.1 SSH r3 is an enhanced version of Chris Newman's NiftyTelnet 1.1 application which adds support for encrypted terminal sessions using the SSH (Secure Shell) protocol. Please read the included Readme file before distributing this version."

• MacSSH is an SSH2-only implementation.

  "MacSSH is a modified version of BetterTelnet with SSH2 support. [...] The only SSH2 client for MacOS that I could find is a commercial product thats costs more than $100, and it crashes my Mac when closing a session... Since it's best to do things by oneself, here's MacSSH."

-Legion

First and foremost, I don't think the theorem is actually called the Klehr-Bliss theorem. AFAIK it's the van Lamoen theorem, since he was the first to furnish a full proof. Lou Talman had a quicker (and simpler) proof that was purely geometric, but I believe it was found to be flawed. I was working on a brute-force algebraic manipulation, but Floor van Lamoen carried essentially the same technique to its completion before I was able to. You can read about his proof here.

Josh's conjecture was pretty accurately summarized in the article. The point E mentioned is actually the circumcenter, the center of the only circle passing through the three vertices of the triangle. Also, it is not exactly correct to say that the lines through A, B, and C intersect in "a point" inside the triangle. The three lines are concurrent (they all pass through a common point, a rare thing for three lines to do), but Josh's slope-reciprocal construction is really just a reflection about the line y=x in the coordinate plane, and changing the orientation of the coordinate axes relative to the triangle makes the point of concurrence wander around inside the triangle. The kicker that I noticed is that as it wanders, it stays on the nine-point circle, or Feuerbach circle of the triangle. I've actually found that there's a lot more to be said along these lines, and to my knowledge none of it has been published.

For the public/private thread... I think that Josh was and is attending a private school (Paideia, an excellent school by the way) though I attended a public one (Collins Hill... not too bad as public schools go).

Not only does the theorem have little to no practical value, it also is of little interest to mathematicians. I've always thought of it as simply a little ditty in triangle geometry. I haven't yet read van Lamoen's article in the AMM, but I believe he mentions it only in passing.

And yes, it is vitally important to have an encouraging mentor. Steve Sigur, Josh's teacher, is a great guy and an excellent math teacher. I don't mean this to trivialize Josh's accomplishment--it's also vitally important to have a creative mind and be willing to explore--but Mr. Sigur deserves the real praise here.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to shamelessly plug The Geometer's Sketchpad. It's a great piece of software that dynamically creates geometric constructions. It's excellent for visualization. I used it to see the generalizations I was after, and I think Josh was using it when he first made his conjecture. If you've any interest in geometry--or are willing to have some anew--you should check this out. You can download a free sample version.

Anyway, I just wanted to post and settle a few things... If anyone has any questions, you can post them here or email me (I'm abliss at freeshell.org). Thanks for your attenton!