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So that's why humans are entitled to so many more fundamental privileges than nonhumans? Because we "can make decisions" and take responsibility for our actions? What about those humans who heavily rely on their instincts? What about infants and mentally handicapped people who are incapable of "reason"? And what about nonhumans that have the ability to learn and remember, and can alter their future actions accordingly? Are they not making decisions?

What you've proposed is a false dilemma, where one either a) has the capability to make decisions, or b) acts instinctually. It's not zero-sum: making decisions and taking responsibility IS instinctual for a great many species, including humans.

I'm sorry, but your handwaiving is no substitute for argument.

Ugh. Another flame-war sparked by those who favor "disclosure". In the minds of some, "disclosure" and "exploit code" are synonymous; anyone who feels differently must be in the "anti-disclosure" camp. As expected, the "disclosure" mujahedin trot out their usual line of reasoning, which is roughly: "if sploits are outlawed, only outlaws will have sploits." And of course, they make the same shrill, baseless ad hominum accusations of sell-outs and cover-ups. Please.

I have some bad news for those who believe that the value of vulnerability information will somehow be irretrievably reduced simply because exploit details are not included.

Let's go to the videotape, shall we? In 2000, Arbaugh, Fithen, and McHugh at the University of Maryland published an IEEE article on the lifecycle of vulnerabilites, based on CERT/CC reporting data. The article contains quite a bit of empirical data and several useful charts. Here is the money quote:

The argument for releasing vulnerability information to the public stems from the belief that crackers already know the information -- but system administators don't... In our research, we found that automating a vulnerability, not just disclosing it, serves as the catalyst for widespread intrusions.

The notion that somehow it doesn't matter if the exploit code is published is just hogwash. It does matter. It makes a decisive difference in the rate of incident occurrences, as the data shows. The number of zero-day exploits is a tiny trickle compared to those that come later, after scripts are widely circulated.

Vulnerability disclosure is critical to making systems more secure. Vulnerability information needs to be freely available to the public. But posting detailed "proof of concept" code that can be easily converted into an automated attack script is another thing entirely. Posting exploit scripts in public forums is, as P.J. O'Rourke once put it, "like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." It is reckless, and irresponsible. Self-important glory-seekers who wail that their livelihoods are at risk, it seems to me, need to develop some more marketable skills.

Also check out Spaceland, A Novel of the Fourth Dimension, which is a tribute to the classic novel about a character in two-dimensional space, Flatland by Edwin Abbott.

And while I'm at it, anything by Gene Wolfe, especially the Book of the New Sun series. Also, for fantasy and goth fans, try Storm Constantine's Wreathru books.

I doubt heat generation would be a problem - I can't really see such a train ever being built.

Consider the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. It descends to a depth of less than 200m below sea level ( see this page or this picture from the same page).
Now consider the atlantic ocean. A cross section is shown on this page.

Firstly, the depth at the maximum is around 5000m below sea level (a cool 25 times deeper than the channel tunnel). A brief search on google for submarine maximum depth tends to suggest that maximum submarine depths (other than for specialised submarines) are typically less than 1000m. See 1, 2 and 3. I can therefore hardly see a commercial train operating at 5000m.

Also, the incline at the continental shelves is a significant factor - trains aren't noted for coping well with steep gradients so a long rise would be needed at either side. I can't comment on whether this is a problem because there is no X axis scale on the referenced atlantic ocean picture.

These are just my opinions and observations of course.

Cheers,

Roger

William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum".

You have to have inflation under debt currency, otherwise you find yourself struggling under deflationary pressure. Our money is created in the form of loans, so when you get 100K to buy a house it is created into the economy, but has to be returned over time plus interest. So every loan adds money to the economy, and then returns back to nothingness. To pay the interest though, someone else needs to go into debt to keep to make up the difference. There is a natural debt creation/destruction cycle in fractional banking, Fiat money doesn't stop it, it just magnifies the timeframe and magnitude.

Printing money with the purpose of "diluting" cash (raising the real rate of inflation) is not inherently evil

Inflation isnt "good" for an economy, just in ours it is better than the alternative, which is crushing deflation. There is only about 1T in M1 money supply in the US, and there is in the ballpark of 8T in outstanding debt. Paying off debt very quickly contracts the money supply. We have to keep borrowing money to keep from contracting. If you really trust politicians and bankers to do the right thing with your money, more power to you. We'll ignore for now that on the watch of these two groups we have seen:

• Massive bubble of the roaring 20s
• Bust of the 1930s
• Depression
• Great Depression
• Confiscation of gold and illegalization of its ownership
• grinding periods of inflation and recession over the last decades
• Increase of debt to GDP to a ratio of 3/1
• Uncontrolled government deficit spending
• The bubble we just went through, wiping many peoples retirement funds out

I'm not ready to pat these people on the back just yet. They have yet to solve the problem inherent in fractional banking and the creation of debt.

Could you explain that concept? Seriously?

You seem to be saying that Fiat money doesn't collapse, because ours hasn't yet. Name the oldest Fiat currency on earth, and what is the longest time a Fiat currency has ever lasted in History? Not one Fiat currency has ever stood the test of time. The US has already gone through a couple Fiat currencies that have collapsed before the federal reserve note was created.

This is the kind of crap governments pull with money... "The printing of such large sums created a major problem. Paper, engravers and printers were hard to find. In desperation, the Secretary of the Treasury recommended that counterfeit money be utilized. Anyone holding a counterfeit bill was supposed to exchange it for a government bond and the government would stamp it "valid" and spend it." That was the confederacy did to their Fiat money.

Fiat money almost always dies the same death, uncontrolled inflation due to state spending. It also usually results is some very socialist measures as governments try to stop people from running from it. If you get a chance, read up on what happened to Rome when its Fiat money hyperinflated, its pretty funny how they attempted to control prices. I can't name any good links off the top of my head, but this one looks like it has some good examples.

3 authors that are IMHO hugely under appreciated:

1/ James Blaylock - P K Dick Award winner - wonderful fantasy, often based on the West Coast, he manages to create wonder out of ordinary human experience by his unique way of describing the world.

Philip K Dick described his work as "A magical world, magically presented...having journeyed there you will not wish to leave, nor ever to forget."

2/ Lucius Shepard - Nebula Award winner writes a mix of SF, fantasy and horror. Green Eyes and Life During Wartime are my favourites.

3/ Rudy Rucker - fiction and nonfiction. The XXXware series are a good fun read. Check 'Mind Tools' and the 4th Dimension for some math mind fuck.

...and China Mieville is one to watch...

3 authors that are IMHO hugely under appreciated: 1/ James Blaylock - P K Dick Award winner - wonderful fantasy, often based on the West Coast, he manages to create wonder out of ordinary human experience by his unique way of describing the world. Philip K Dick described his work as "A magical world, magically presented...having journeyed there you will not wish to leave, nor ever to forget." 2/ Lucius Shepard - Nebula Award winner writes a mix of SF, fantasy and horror. Green Eyes and Life During Wartime are my favourites. 3/ Rudy Rucker - fiction and nonfiction. The XXXware series are a good fun read. Check 'Mind Tools' and the 4th Dimension for some math mind fuck. ...and China Mieville is one to watch...

I might like technical consistence & cluefulness more than most people. The following list of writers reflects that.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing just released Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Cory and his work have been mentioned here a time or five before. He just co-wrote Jury Service with Charlie Stross, another loopy fun writer. Stross' Lobsters is online; Stross' interview and appearance on Slashdot made me seek out more. Stross' list of published fiction includes a dozen online versions of stories. Both Doctorow & Stross are entertainingly loopy, and technically consistent & clueful.

John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" and "The Shockwave Rider" are good dystopian lit.

Bruce Sterling is still around; he just wrote "Tomorrow Now," a non-fiction futurist book. Zeitgeist, Distraction, and Holy Fire were all enjoyable and insightful.

Vernor Vinge coined the term "singularity." "A Deepness in the Sky" and "A Fire Upon the Deep" have a joining character pre- and post-Singularity, and both won Hugos. He just released some short stories, but I haven't read it yet.

Matt Ruff wrote the science fiction "Sewer Gas & Electric" and fantasy "Fool on the Hill." The first is funny and fast-paced.

I've enjoyed K. W. Jeter, Rudy Rucker, Roger Williams (The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect) a bit...

Technical accuracy isn't his forte, but Jim Monroe, a former managing editor of Adbusters, wrote Angry Young Spaceman and Living in Silico. I downloaded AYS ages ago, but bought a copy during his tour so I can loan it to friends. Oh, and checking now, he's put his 1999 book Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask up.

I also liked Rudy Rucker's Software and Wetware. It was a bit hard to get started reading Software, but once started I really enjoyed it.

I see he has also written quite a bit more

1. MS donates computers/software to 3rd world countries
2. "What good is Microsoft's computer aid to children who don't have food, etc?"
3. The implication (attack) is MS doesn't provide aid in these areas

Reason to whine? Comparing now to the depression?

How about this: The current unemployment rate is 5.6%. At the height of the depression, the unemployment rate was 25%+

By historical standards, this "recession" is absolute peanuts. This generation has the most opportunity of any generation in HISTORY.

Every generation thinks they have it the worst.

Let me get this straight: in your posts you (repeatedly) call Stallman a propagandist, "inhumanly" arrogant and "dangerous, subversive in the bad sense of the word;" but you now claim you aren't engaging in ad hominem attacks on him because, after all, if you had really wanted to attack him you'd have called him a Communist...which you didn't. So in your mind, you haven't attacked Stallman at all.

To quote from the link I posted for you: "Ad hominem fallacies take a number of different forms, though all share the fact that they attempt to re-focus attention, away from the argument made and onto the person making it."

The point is that you try to discredit Stallman's ideas by saying bad things about him personally...things that are untrue, in my opinion. The fact that you could have said even nastier (in your mind) things about him doesn't change the fact that yes, you are attacking him.

I read Stallman's ideas incessantly...keeping a copy of those propaganda guides open beside me as I go.

Again, my suggestion was that you read Stallman's ideas and give them some thought, instead of just getting steamed because his ideas persuasively conflict with your entrenched world view. Keeping your mind closed to new ideas is a bad way to protect yourself from propaganda.

I would particularly suggest this essay.

I disagree with much of what Stallman has said and written over the years. It wouldn't bother me so much were it not for his continued use of evocative propaganada in his writings.

What seems to "bother" you is that Stallman has advanced persuasive arguments in favor of an idea that conflicts with your existing world view. Rather than rethink that world view in light of the new information, you emotionally reject it as "propaganda." This is, in fact, a very human reaction. It is often difficult for people to accept new ideas, even good ones, that conflict with their entrenched existing ideas. This is particularly true when the person in question has an economic interest in maintaining their current world view, as you do.

In your post and in your essay, you spend a great deal of time attacking Stallman and his ideas as "propaganda," without rebutting those ideas. This is called an argumentum ad hominem attack ("against the man") and is considered a very poor argument--I'll resist the urge to call it "propaganda." And no, simply stating that you hold some particular belief as fundamental (e.g. "I believe that the owner of a computer program has the right to sell it") is not a rebuttal.

When I see an author trying to persuade me emotionally rather than through reason or logic, it makes me suspicious.

Indeed. These are emotional issues to those who understand them; DRM legislation, for example, could potentially have a devestating long-term impact on our society. I find Stallman's ideas to be exceptionally well-reasoned and logical. Clearly, you react to them very emotionally; I suggest you read Stallman's ideas again and give them some thought.

• "Liberalitas" is "the Roman goddess/personification of, variously, generosity, largesse, and social virtue".

• "Liberi" are freemen - either born free (ingenui), or having been freed from slavery (libertini).

For anyone interested in brushing up on calculus, I highly recommend Howard Swann's cartoon opus,
"Professor E. McSquared's Calculus Primer"

It is the best introduction to Calculus I've ever come across, and while many mathematicians know of the book and recommend it, it is rarely seen in bookstores.

Unlike most calculus books which assume you already know calculus, Prof. E. McSquared assumes that you will have difficulty with calculus and patiently explains some of the difficult initial concepts.

The best place to get it is from Dr. Howard Swann himself (who is at San Jose State University), via
http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/swann/mcsqrd.ht ml

Well, here's a commentary on that, and here's another. Another look at a Chinese project suggests that political problems can surmount any level of technical ability.

Since the original post mentioned this as if we should be familiar with it, here're the details: A big dam in China failed, in large part because the Communist ideologues over-ruled the hydrologists. Many thousands died, but of course that's all right because the houses of the Party cadre were built on high ground. Click on that link for the fine print.

But a teaching credential is different. Basically, a teaching credential means taking some classes on "how to teach," and on subjects like how to deal with the needs of minor students, and the legal obligations of teachers (e.g. reporting knowledge of molestation). The requirements for a teaching credential differ for the age group being taught, in a fairly logical way, at least in California. (See the links, below.)

I have a B.A. degree in journalism, plus a J.D. (law) degree, plus a number of years of respectable work experience. I'm confident that I could probably get a job teaching college classes if I wanted, and for a couple years I even taught a class in the local school district's "adult education" program. But I absolutely believe that I would need special training to be qualified to teach to children.

What is disturbing to me, is that school districts are permitted to hire uncertified teachers, who can continue employment for up to five years while making NO effort toward certification. Until recently, these 'teachers' could be dropped into classrooms without ANY training (some were even permitted to skip orientation sessions), and when they "timed out" in one school district they could simply start the clock again in another school district.

And where did this happen most often? In inner-city schools, where the obstacles are so plentiful that we need the very best-trained teachers.

What is involved in getting a teaching certification? Spend one summer at a local college's intense program, or night school for a couple nights per week for two semesters or three quarters. Read, do the homework, pass the exams.

Nobody pretends that it is difficult to get a teaching certification: the classes can be easy, the exams a breeze. It is only "difficult" for those who want to cut corners and try to teach kids without ever learning "how kids learn" and how to deal with situations that arise in the classroom setting.

I occasionally think that I'd like to teach, but I really don't think I have the energy or stamina. Start my first class at 8am? Teach five 50-minute classes per day, with an average of 35 students per class (175 students!). Deal with career teachers and petty bureaucracy? Survive the intense emotional needs of children? Grade papers and exams while watching TV every night? Maybe I could teach one or two classes per day, or better yet nine to twelve hours per week of classroom teaching time (like a college professor).

Teaching is a very difficult job, and we don't pay teachers very well, hardly even a living wage unless they "play the game" of seeking out a master's degree in education and survive many years in a school district to work up the pay ladder. Yeah, they get 8 to 10 weeks of summer vacation, and maybe they work fewer hours than some of us who've ridden the dot-com roller coaster, but they are doing something we all agree must be done -- and done well -- and it is a job I know that most people couldn't do very well.

Some links:

• Tips for becoming a teacher
• Yahoo:K-12 Education
• Single Subject Teaching Credential (California), program at San Jose State Univ.
• California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, index page
• Education Week article: Teaching as a Profession
• US Dept of Labor summary of typical teaching requirements for K-12
• Becoming a Math or Science Teacher in California
• An Inner City School Teacher's account of the experience

But a teaching credential is different. Basically, a teaching credential means taking some classes on "how to teach," and on subjects like how to deal with the needs of minor students, and the legal obligations of teachers (e.g. reporting knowledge of molestation). The requirements for a teaching credential differ for the age group being taught, in a fairly logical way, at least in California. (See the links, below.)

I have a B.A. degree in journalism, plus a J.D. (law) degree, plus a number of years of respectable work experience. I'm confident that I could probably get a job teaching college classes if I wanted, and for a couple years I even taught a class in the local school district's "adult education" program. But I absolutely believe that I would need special training to be qualified to teach to children.

What is disturbing to me, is that school districts are permitted to hire uncertified teachers, who can continue employment for up to five years while making NO effort toward certification. Until recently, these 'teachers' could be dropped into classrooms without ANY training (some were even permitted to skip orientation sessions), and when they "timed out" in one school district they could simply start the clock again in another school district.

And where did this happen most often? In inner-city schools, where the obstacles are so plentiful that we need the very best-trained teachers.

What is involved in getting a teaching certification? Spend one summer at a local college's intense program, or night school for a couple nights per week for two semesters or three quarters. Read, do the homework, pass the exams.

Nobody pretends that it is difficult to get a teaching certification: the classes can be easy, the exams a breeze. It is only "difficult" for those who want to cut corners and try to teach kids without ever learning "how kids learn" and how to deal with situations that arise in the classroom setting.

I occasionally think that I'd like to teach, but I really don't think I have the energy or stamina. Start my first class at 8am? Teach five 50-minute classes per day, with an average of 35 students per class (175 students!). Deal with career teachers and petty bureaucracy? Survive the intense emotional needs of children? Grade papers and exams while watching TV every night? Maybe I could teach one or two classes per day, or better yet nine to twelve hours per week of classroom teaching time (like a college professor).

Teaching is a very difficult job, and we don't pay teachers very well, hardly even a living wage unless they "play the game" of seeking out a master's degree in education and survive many years in a school district to work up the pay ladder. Yeah, they get 8 to 10 weeks of summer vacation, and maybe they work fewer hours than some of us who've ridden the dot-com roller coaster, but they are doing something we all agree must be done -- and done well -- and it is a job I know that most people couldn't do very well.

Some links:

• Tips for becoming a teacher
• Yahoo:K-12 Education
• Single Subject Teaching Credential (California), program at San Jose State Univ.
• California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, index page
• Education Week article: Teaching as a Profession
• US Dept of Labor summary of typical teaching requirements for K-12
• Becoming a Math or Science Teacher in California
• An Inner City School Teacher's account of the experience

Perhaps you would do well to educate yourself on the difference between satire and namecalling.

And perhaps you need to learn the difference between satire and sarcasm. Also consider why ad hominem might be an appropriate response to sarcasm.

From this discussion on ad hominem agruments:

Only in the case of opinions, expert and otherwise, where you must rely not on the argument or evidence being presented but on the judgment of someone else, may personal or background information be used to evaluate the ideas expressed.

The sole evidence for your rhetorical flourish was an unsupported prediction of the future: "and rates won't go down one cent."

You will also notice that I went beyond the ad hominem attack to point out the absurdity of you position, which you have ceased to defend.

Don't like the Skeptic? Well, then try this, or this, or maybe even that.

Well, somebody may have said it before him, but he said it best. This reminds me of his excellent "ware" series of novels. I highly recommend them to anyone who likes Bruce Sterling or William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. Check out his website. Lots of interesting stuff. I think he brought up vat grown meat in Freeware. "Wendy Meat" still makes me laugh thinking about it.

On a sidenote, I always though spirulina would be useful for growing food in space. Which sounds more distasteful, eating algae or vat meat? ;)

All this money wasted on these rockets brings to mind the book
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer is a great history as told by a Soviet engineer of a number of different massive engineering failures that occurred under central planning. I.E The Building of the white sea canal in which 200,000 people died and the resulting canal was much less usefull than the railroad that was proposed by engineers before the commencement of construction that would have cost less to build in terms of lives and capital.

BTW, the greatest technological failure of all time was a series of dam collapes in China in 1975 that caused the deaths of more than 85,000 people and as many as 200,000 if you count the resulting disease epidemics set off.. Story here. Which is why everyone has been so warry of the Three Gorges Dam project.

At least California: San José State University has licensed the Windows source code.

He also helped author 3 Autodesk products, taught mathematics and computer science at San Jose State University and wrote a framework for video game development.

True, some writers only write, but others have farther-reaching influence [Aasimov and Carl Sagan come to mind], and at any rate coming up with a concept is the first step in innovation.

We're talking about being monitored, about having your face scanned and compared to a database. That is fundamentaly different than being observed.

It's exactly identical. What's the difference between a policeman seeing your face on the street and comparing your face to a "database" in his brain, and comparing your face to a database back at the office? Hypothetical: If we could implant a device that allowed perfect recall of police files in a policeman's brain, would you be against it? Why? Policeman should only have imperfect recall?

"Expectation of privacy" is not a legal term.

I hope you didn't pay much for your "legal dictionary". For your education, check out this law review article about these very issues. My favorite quote is this: "Therefore, based upon prior cases, it seems unlikely that the Court would characterize police video surveillance on the street as a "search," because the Court has stated that no reasonable expectation of privacy exists on public streets."

I never said that, why do you pretend that I've said something I haven't and then proceed to argue that non-existent statement?

The "?" symbol at the end of my sentence indicates a question, not a statement. I notice that you dodged the question at the end.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. If history teaches anything, it's that megacorps, meganations, and mega-anything rot themselves out from the inside once avarice and power-lust replaces hunger and passion. I don't know how the Microsoft juggernaut will eventually founder, but I do know that it will. No matter how much cash is thrown at them, the best and the brightest can not thrive, or even survive, among relentlessly expanding cadres of focus-group marketroids, lawyers, MBAs, and suited Napoleans still trying to compensate for pimply highschool careers. In the long run, history teaches that innovation, success and ascension are sustained by hearts and minds, not dollars and marketshare. Hearts and minds are what currently drive open source development...$$ drives Microsoft. Place your bets.

BTW, Christopher Woods wrote a superb analysis of the Japanese brush with dominance called The Bubble Economy (recent dot com stockholders can also benefit from it). Here's a reference to a summary.

Rudy Rucker, author of the Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware series. He later wrote a somewhat more accessible introduction to thinking about dimension called The Fourth Dimension and How to Get There which I recommend highly. Rudy Rucker is lots of fun and most things he gets involved with are cool - check out his list of works.
--

Rudy Rucker, author of the Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware series. He later wrote a somewhat more accessible introduction to thinking about dimension called The Fourth Dimension and How to Get There which I recommend highly. Rudy Rucker is lots of fun and most things he gets involved with are cool - check out his list of works.
--

Rudy Rucker anticipated this in his novel Software . He called it flicker-cladding.

Agriculture can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.

On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.

The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the fertilization and watched.

When they terminated the fertilization, the artificial ecosystem eventually disappeared.

The density of nutrients is important. If you have too much, the phytoplankton dies without being eaten by the zooplankton (or grazing fish) and rots, thereby removing oxygen from the water and suffocating the grazers and fish. Too little nutrient, and you have an ocean desert. There is a broad range of nutrient density where zooplankton and fish can swim from one meal to the next without starving -- and the abundant fish catches off of Peru are an example of what you get when you make it easy for fish to fatten up on phytoplankton grazers.

The ratio of Peru's fish production between normal (fertile) times to El Ninio is 1000.

The areas of ocean desert amenable to such fertilization vastly exceed those required to economically provide the entire world's population with a protein rich diet based on high quality sea food. An added benefit is that the phytoplankton growth captures CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming.

This option for humanity is no where more important than in Africa and the Amazon where populations that are well adapted for the tropics are currently threatening some of Earth's most valuable natural habitats with some of the most inefficient agricultural uses of land. Those who seek to save the tropics should take objective steps toward opening up this tropical oceanic frontier.

In conclusion: Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.

One of the departments in our college have been building a microsatellite for a few years now. They hope to send it up in the next year or so as a secondary payload. They also have a link to many other colleges with their own microsatellites. Check it all out at SJSU Spartnik

Compare how frequently you have to design and implement classes in your own work to the frequency with which you need to design and implement algorithms. These days, all the algorithms and data structures that would be taught in an AP class are provided by libraries that you just use. I know the vast majority of code anyone writes just sort of does stuff, it can hardly be called an algorithm. But making good choices about program structure (and these days this means class structure) is crucial to having any hope of ever getting a program to work, let alone run efficiently.

A while back the San Jose State University Professional Development Center asked me to teach some programming classes.

I proposed to teach two classes, one on the fundamentals of object-oriented programming, and the other an OOP project - writing a program of some significant size (considering the experience level of the students).

My descriptions of the two classes are given here. The links to the original course descriptions in that page seem to be dead now.

I felt that these two courses addressed two signicant flaws in most introductory programming education - one was an inordinate focus on the particulars of a language without concentrating on how to program well, and the other was that the exercises done in a course rarely took more than a week to do, and even if there was a term project, it usually was mixed in with other work, and so it wouldn't be of significant size.

This means that exercises in most introductory courses typically gloss over important issues that crop up in real software development, like robust error handling and dealing with the architecture of your program on a large scale.

These courses weren't meant to be that long so I really couldn't get that far into it but the point was that I would be neither teaching the language nor computer science (algorithms, data structures, etc.). Instead, I would be teaching what I could probably get flamed at for calling The Art of Software Engineering.

In the first course, I would concentrate on how to make good choices for what classes to use in your program and how they should relate to each other (when to use inheritance vs. composition, for example), basically how to acquire a good sense of aesthetics for the best way to divide your problem into maanageable parts. There are an infinitude of ways you can write a program, but a far lesser number of good ways to write a program, and this is not commonly taught.

I would use Java in the class, but cover the bare minimum of the language required to cover the conceptual material. Someone else was planning on teaching a course on Java itself.

I also felt that the project course would be of significant value in helping the students find real programming jobs. While they may have to expand on the projects after leaving the class, I knew that (at the time anyway), noone would hire a novice programmer until he'd shipped a product (oh how times have changed) - free software and shareware does count as a real product, but the important thing is that you have to have completed a program of some significant size.

Ironically, the courses were canceled after only two students signed up for them by the enrollment deadline.

Our general theory was that the students didn't percieve this classes as having an immediate payoff in a marketable job skill (SJSU Prof Dev was in good part a fundraising component of the regular University so the classes were frequently targeted towards marketable skills) - when really I felt it would do you more good than a class concentrating on Java or any particular language - it's not hard to pick up a language out of a book but what I meant to teach really would need personal interaction and discussion with an instructor and one's classmates.

I'd still like to teach the classes. I am doing just that in one form by writing GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tips.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

There is a similar project in the Internet Mapping Project, whcih some of you may remember. It has been going on for a while. Other interesting mapping and visualization projects are at The Stillman Projects and C5's 1:1.

I expect that a whopping lot of people would not consider Linux, The Kernel to be terribly useful for terribly much. After all, it doesn't include:

• A shell such as zsh; note that the notion of separating OS from shell was largely due to Multics, where the command language had its commands reference programs.
• A C library as an interface to programs, such as GLIBC
• Some set of initialization controls as with init
• ... And then the whole set of "user space" stuff, including compilers, text editors, file tools, word processors, and such...
• ... And if you want to do anything graphical, you'll be using something that is recognizably "not Linux," whether you use SVGAlib or XFree86.

The question of where the OS "stops," and where "non-OS stuff" starts is incredibly unclear.

It is not an outrageous thing to argue that Linux is "just the kernel;" that certainly does represent something that is recognizably associated with Linux, and most other components such as GLIBC, X11, GNOME, KDE, GCC, and such are decidedly not specific to Linux as they are used with other OSes of whatever provenance.

It is also not an outrageous thing to think that an "operating system" might include a bunch of additional abstractions that make it useful, which could well include GLIBC, X11, GNOME, KDE, and such.

I prefer to live in the "realm of ambiguity:"

• I would consider MS-DOS to be, while rather sparse in functionality, providing little more than a CP/M program loader, along with a userspace defined by COMMAND.COM , ANSI.SYS and some other .SYS file whose name escapes me, to indeed be an "operating system."

  It is a minimal OS, to be sure; note that you need the program loader, terminal controller, and ( whatever the INIT equivalent is) to have some semblance of a functioning system.

• I'm not sure where to draw the line with Linux.
• Someone using Linux to build embedded systems might stop the line very shortly past init by implementing a custom userspace.
• Someone using Linux to deploy Internet "WebSurfing" Kiosks might consider the "OS" part of the system to include everything below a surface loosely defined by X11; the "application" side being the JavaScript and Java stuff that people might run atop Mozilla.
• On that "kiosk," if they used cfengine to clean up the system configuration every time a new user logs on, there's some ambiguity as to whether:
  • The "operating system" includes cfengine, or
  • The "operating system" includes cfengine plus the scripts used to clean up "system" stuff.

The author of the magazine article in question obviously holds to a dogma that includes some portion of the "GUI" as part of the "operating system."

I would contend that in a heterogeneous world with computer systems used for different things, there's not a good straight answer to this.

His books have some neat ideas but his characters all seem to devolve into the same loser / burnout type. According to his biography he's working on an historical novel about Peter Bruegel which I look forward to as an interesting change. The fourth *ware book, Realware just came out.

His books have some neat ideas but his characters all seem to devolve into the same loser / burnout type. According to his biography he's working on an historical novel about Peter Bruegel which I look forward to as an interesting change. The fourth *ware book, Realware just came out.

Another poster has already implied this:

Why should this sort of discussion involve only games? What about other software that's out-of-print and no longer supported?

Putting old games into the public domain would set a precedent that the business software developers do not want to see. All old and unsupported software would become fair game, and Micros~1 innovation would be exposed for what it is - meme recycling.

First, let's consider that there's lots of good ideas out there, and someone still owns the rights to them. It's quite possible that the holders of these rights would like to act on them, but are waiting for a statute of limitation to expire before they do so. For example, maybe IBM would like to bring back the SmartSuite; they own the rights via their acquisition of Lotus - but there may be an injunction preventing this action for some number of years... IANAL and all that.

Now for the more likely (IMO) scenario:

What would happen for example, if M$ suddenly HAD to open DOS 6.0, and EMM386.EXE turned out to contain some undocumented calls that ... ARE STILL THERE in Win98 (shock!).

Thing is, code is code, and who's to say what makes a particular piece of code into a game.
For example, James Gleick's Chaos: The Software (featured for free here) is educational in nature; but I consider it a game. So is GIMP in my book, since I don't use it 'for work'. Same with AutoCad... It's just a fun little drawing program for me... Open up all but the current version, I say!

Now, this would be great for me, and most of you. But the rights-holders for old software may have some objections to openning up old software.

The Hacker and the Ants is excellent! Those particular ants were software, rather than hardware, but who cares - it's a most entertaining read. I personally have found Rucker's novels to be a mixed bag, some good, some, well, not good. But The Hacker and the Ants is the best that I've read thus far.

For entertaining nonfiction, it's hard to beat Rucker's SEEK!. Both of these, and more, can probably be found at your local (or online) book merchant.

You can also go get some neat software for free (cellular automata, artificial life, and chaos stuff mostly) at Rucker's web page.

Gee, that sounds ominous, doesn't it?

The New Urbanists are a set of architects and city planners who believe that America lost its soul when it moved to the auto-oriented suburbs, from Levittown right up to the Antelope Valley ... or Littleton. [There's the Katz connection!] When you insulate yourself from your neighbors, when you eat at Appleby's and shop at Target or the Gap, you're eliminating most of the sense of community that was important to people's lives just a generation ago.

New Urbanists believe that encouraging small, close-knit, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods with neo-traditional architecture is one of the keys toward restoring that social structure.

I'm not convinced, and if anything, Disney's experiment in Celebration shows that this ideal can have a dark side. Still, there are many other examples that are not run by The Mouse; in fact other communities often eschew the corporate influence that seems endemic here. That doesn't mean they don't (for instance) have a Starbucks -- but it may mean requiring a franchise operator to be a resident.

The school at Celebration has been one of the touchiest problems they've dealt with. Florida law didn't allow them to run a private school here, so they had to accomodate many state laws and found they couldn't do some innovative things they wanted. Say what you will about Disney; they do care about education. It's the parents, ironically, who've objected to the direction the school has taken.

This experiment still has much to teach us ...

Here's an article on Celebration, with several photos.

Here's a visitor's overview of Celebration.

Sources for a dissertation on Celebration.

New Urbanism and Celebration.

This is akin to mathematician-novelist Rucker's concept of "boppers" a-life as I understand it. To see Rucker's home page, follow this link.