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But imagine a world in which teaching in high school is such an attractive profession that it would be worth the trouble of a doctoral level education to get the job. For that to happen, we would have to pay teachers more, at least as much as what graduating doctoral students get. And they should be paid more.

True, elevating the status of the teaching profession will attract better and more qualified teachers. But have you heard the cliche, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink!"? Providing great teachers will help the kids who want to learn. Of course, the kids who want to learn have many places to get information today, namely the library, internet and cable channels like TLC and Discovery.

But the root problem is that most kids don't want to learn. They're more concerned about their clothes, hair and coolness factor than acids, bases and ph levels. "What do I need to know that for?", is the battle cry I've heard so many times from young and old who choose to live a life of ignorance. They then proceed to tell you how they don't care to know this or that detail because it is a waste of time and they'll never need to use the information. To these people, scientific knowledge is an affliction which fills their precious memory cells with
"useless" information. These cells might otherwise be more valuable by containing information on which hollywood actor is doing which actress this week.

You won't make science interesting to these kids until you can relate it to their base drives: food, fashion, sex and the quest for being cool. Relate Newton's laws of motion to how women's breasts move, both with and without a bra, and you'll have a standing room audience for your class. Speak about the aphrodisiac qualities of chocolate, while relating it to dopamine and pleasure centers in the brain and you'll have students begging to take your class. Show them a probability distribution that shows their chance of having a nice salary and pretty wife based on their years of education completed and you'll keep them in school far better than any other method.

If none of that works, skip the Phd's -- hire strippers.

Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - you choose

I'm struggling to figure out why Palm would do this acquisition. I mean sure they pick up some world class software developers who could surely help them in working with the PalmOS - but what are they going to do with the BeOS?

Another poster suggested that they port BeOS to the Palm color. I'm sure it's feasible - says my brain even though it can barely spell BeOS - but it wouldn't really shine in the Palm. The BeOS is a true pervasively multi-threaded OS. AFAIK, it was built for heavy multimedia applications that involve a lot of disk I/O -- something you rarely see in a Palm device.

Now if Palm were going to make a play to expand the BeOS product line for the desktop -- ie. try to compete headon with Micro$oft, Linux, BSD, etc. that would be interesting! It's too bad that AOL/Time Warner wasn't the one doing the acquisition - they'd have much deeper pockets to actually make the desktop OS competition interesting.

Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - you decide

So before scoffing at this, just think what it would be like if YOU couldn't type. Sure you MIGHT be able to improvise and such - but your productivity would go WAY down ...

Well actually my productivity is pretty low to begin with. I'm usually typing with one hand while I'm either eating or jerking off with the other. But I understand what you're saying.

Now if I couldn't werk the gerkin anymore - that would be a disability!

Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - you decide

...but this is a great way to meet women.

Absolutely! And make sure to install that handy dandy webcam on their computer. Especially if there are possibilities of lesbian action!

In the beginning, things were flat rate because there was no non-burdensone technology to measure use. Phone usage, ...

From my recollection, I believe you are mistaken. In the beginning, there was not flat rate phone usage. You were allowed to make x number of local calls per month and were then charged for each call after that. Over time, people despised the pay per use model and effectively forced the phone companies into offering flat fee / unlimited use pricing.

This same trend is happening in internet usage, cell phone usage, etc. -- do you recall when a number of ISP's charged you for x number of hours per month? They rarely, if at all, do that anymore.

The service providers always wish you to pay per use. However, the customers always want unlimited use, flat fee pricing.

Given that in capitalist systems the consumer always ends up deciding how goods are sold, most IP products are moving towards flat fee, unlimited use models.

I could see something like that happening to music where you pay your $30/month and listen to whatever music you want.

... automobile "registration" fees, property taxes. Quit paying on any of these and you are deprived use of items you thought you "bought". And piracy is the boogeyman used to justify most of this. Unlimited use software, and infinitely reviewable movies will someday be redefined as "theft".

Okay, auto registration and property taxes are not pay per use schemes, nor are they implemented by the "IP holder". This is just plain silly, your argument was questionable before, but this just pushes it over the cliff.

If you go into a store today and purchase an audio CD or video DVD, you have paid a flat fee for an unlimited use license for that intellectual property. It's an unlimited use license as in you can view or listen to it as many times as you like. It doesn't mean you can copy it to other formats and transfer it around.

How on earth do you see the RIAA or MPAA changing how they do business to institute a model where you pay to view or listen to the art only once? How do you imagine the consumers allowing this to happen?

I don't see the trend towards pay per use in the examples you've given. Instead from my blurry specs, I see where more and more providers are bundling their goods in flat fee / unlimited use offerings.

Sex, cars or computers? - Pay $0.00 per use.

You know, I just returned from JavaOne and I was surprised. For a language that has only been around for about 5 or so years, Java has seen tremendous growth and acceptance. JavaOne, the annual developer's conference for Java, already sees 20,000+ participants making it the second largest computer conference after Comdex. Sun reports that there are over 3 million Java developers. Whatever you may think about Java, you must admit that this embracing of the language by developers is impressive.

But why are people flocking to the language? My belief is they are motivated by the fact that it is the Grand Unification Language. Java, through design or accident, has acquired features that make it easy to use many different aspects of programming. Let's walk through some of these:

• Easily write simple Hello World app - similar to many languages
• OS portability - similar to many shell languages such as Perl, Korn, etc.
• Hardware portability - similar to C, C++ and others except that Java is also running on smart cards, cell phones, pda's and Sony recently announced it will run on the Playstation 2
• Socket based networking - similar to C, C++ and Perl
• Object based networking - similar to CORBA, COM+
• 2D Graphics - similar to X, MFC, Tk
• 3D Graphics - similar to OpenGL
• No pointers - similar to scripting languages such as Php3, Perl, etc. Except that Java has much more advanced use of object references and garbage collection
• Scripting capability - similar to Php3, asp, Perl
• Client side vs. Server side VM optimization - similar to ? - Sun's recent HotSpot JVM's run in either client side mode or server side mode. As you can imagine, each is optimized to running fast for their particular environment.
• Threading - similar to Ada
• Self documenting - similar to ? - javadoc, in my opinion, is the killer feature for Java. The fact that I can easily document my classes in a standard html format means that others can quickly learn about them and use them more effectively. Php3 has done a good job documenting their language on their web site, which is one of the many reasons why they are so successful. Budding language authors take note: including an easy documentation system with your language will increase the speed of acceptance by others.

Take your favorite language and see how many of the features it has built in. Obviously, all of the features listed above are available by third party vendors for languages like C. However, having them part of the core language lowers the barrier to entry for newbies to try things out.

So back to your question about whether Java should be the underpinning of a CS education. If your goal is for the students to learn about how software interacts with the hardware and how to use resources effectively, then Assembly is the way to go - this was the underpinning of my own education. If instead, you want to give them a solid base from which they can branch out and experiment in a myriad set of directions, then unquestionably Java is the answer.

Just my $0.02, keep the change.

The secret to life is sex, cars or computers

No, but there is an excellent book by Carl Sagan, entitled, The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark.

Sagan does an excellent job in justifying the use of the scientific method to evaluate claims such as those made by Chiu.

Alex is right in saying that many did not believe in Einstein and Tesla. But the fact that Einstein was eventually proven correct does not mean that every person making a claim is just a misunderstood genius. Sagan works through many different types of *alternative* sciences, providing examples of how he would apply the scientific method towards separating the wheat from the chaff.

Sagan's book is a must read. For me, it's up there with The Selfish Gene by Dawkins.

Some want immortality, I just want sex, cars or computers

That immortal 19 year old boy doesn't look a day over 40.

*Jinkies* Do the math (he was 19 in 1990, it's now 2001, carry the 1, integrate by parts) and he's only 30 years old right now!

He must have put the rings on the wrong fingers, reversed the polarity and is actually increasing his aging!

Want to know the secret to the life? It's all about sex, cars or computers.