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"The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the form of the language, and some of the decisions made rather lightheartedly for the ``Recursive functions ...'' paper later proved unfortunate. These included the COND notation for conditional expressions which leads to an unnecessary depth of parentheses, and the use of the number zero to denote the empty list NIL and the truth value false. Besides encouraging pornographic programming, giving a special interpretation to the address 0 has caused difficulties in all subsequent implementations."

-John McCarthy, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/no de3.html

It is also good to read the history of LISP because we need to remember that LISP was developed specifically for the killer application of artificial intelligence. Unfortunately looking back we can now see that artificial intelligence stagnated for decades. What happened? The field was caught in an unhealthy fascination with exactitude, theorem-proving, logic. While these mathematical ideas are beautiful and engrossing, we have to keep in mind we are dealing with a problem area of artificial intelligence that is supposed to work in the real world. The right way to progress in artificial intelligence was to embrace statistical, evolutionary approaches.

Of course LISP is Turing-complete (provably), so in theory anything can be programmed in it. But we have to understand from reading the history the mindset associated with its origins, origins that are linked to an attempt to subsume artificial intelligence as a subset of mathematical logic. In this context, LISP can be argued to be computer science's greatest catastrophe. If great programs to finally succeed in conquering artificial intelligence are only now being written in LISP, it is just evidence that, academically speaking, the previous generation needed to die off to let progress resume.

They invented pointers and mice.

They may have invented pointers, but Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in 1968 while working at Stanford Research Institute. Xerox PARC invented a lot of cool stuff--in fact, they invented most of the things we take for granted in computing, but they didn't invent all of them.

But Perl poetry has a long history.

Personally, I found Donald Knuth's Literate Programming as well as the Practice of Programming to be wonderful resources for writing better, more beautiful code.

This article is very interesting; the idea of code as an art form isn't new, but this article certainly is aggresive in encouraging it.

But what about "Extreme Programming" - doesn't it encourage the same thing, in terms of self-commenting code? Or does its specific nature essentially negate that aspect?

...is not reading email anymore. Read it at Knuth versus Email.

'I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.'
--- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

Can you explain to me which fonts aren't in widgets? Pretty much every piece of text you see in the screen, from the text in your mailreader to the text in your web browser (though, due to evil hackery, this patch doesn't work on Mozilla) is in a widget. Get a clue dude. With regards to improvement...I notice a pretty big difference at 1600x1200. I suppose it all depends how picky you are about your text.

If you want to see shots of it in action...see

http://www.stanford.edu/~snickell/

Every major operating system has already done this for years. This is serious catchup.

-seth

BBCNews have covered this,
which also forms part of one of their 'indepth' news anaylsis.
They also have a link to Stanford where their president has issued his responce.

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how well the video compression works. It's the Latency, Stupid, as the article of this link points out that kills the performace of data transfer in modems, making them pretty unreliable for streaming video no matter how large the bandwidth is.

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how well the video compression works. It's the Latency, Stupid, as the article of this link points out that kills the performace of data transfer in modems, making them pretty unreliable for streaming video no matter how large the bandwidth is.

My first guess it that these aussies have impressed clueless execs with ordinary tech.

My second guess is that maybe someone finally got around to applying foveation in a way that works really well.

Perhaps these aussies are hooking up test audiences to eye-tracking devices, and recording their average gaze during a film so that they can get even higher compression by throwing out what's outside most peoples field of view?

*shrug*

You can still buy plain old bricks in large quantities, they're just not easy to find. I've found that the best deal for my money is set #3033. The contents of this set can be found here. Sure, there's a somewhat large number of the stupid 1x1s, but it still comes with a lot of useful bricks. My personal collection is up to 11 or 12 tubs now.

For general LEGOs, I've found that Lugnet is quite a good reference for shopping for LEGO as well as just plain fun LEGO pages and info.

There's been lately a bit of discussion on non-text or non-linear programming languages; from purely visual programming languages like Jaron Lanier's Mandala to literate programming languages like CWEB, there seems to be a trend beyond ASCII-linear text programs. Your colorforth seems to be an effort in that direction

Question is: where do you think this field is headed? Will non-ASCII programing languages be niche players, or will some of them become as widely used as PERL or Java? Is there something fundamentally different you can do with non-ASCII PLs? Or something that you can't do with other programming languages, like C++?

PS: I had a glimpse of Forth ~20 years ago with a Forth interpreter for the ZX Spectrum, which beeped and printed color squares while it was interpreting stuff. Quite funny, indeed! Or maybe a harbinger of ColorForth...

• Sapphire from Stanford and Washington University at St. Louis, the "group of graduate schools" satellite
• PicoSat for the STP (Space Test Program) was built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, the "one from the Department of Defense"
• PCsat
• Starshine III

SRP - Secure Remote Passwords. A stanford project that isn't vulnerable to timing attacks found when typing passwords over an interactive connection.

Also, to "fix" ssh, just don't send passwords as you type them; wait until enter is pressed and always send a fixed length chunk of encrypted data.

What I would consider to be the first GUI was Sutherland's "Sketchpad" system from the early 60's. The military had similar sorts of things predating Sutherland, but nothing quite flexible enough to really be called a full blown GUI.

Sketchpad was essentially a constraint-based drawing program using a lightpen, and using object-oriented principles for its implementation. However, to call it a GUI is not quite correct. There were e.g. no UI elements represented on the screen (such as buttons, menus, or windows). A graphics app is not the same as a GUI, i.e. a UI that uses graphics.

The thesis can be found online here: (scanned, no pdf in '63 :-) Sketchpad, a man-machine graphical communication system . Evidently, all the graphics in the thesis were generated by the program it described (Sketchpad). According to Alan Kay this is rare for graphics theses.

Anybody with their brains in the right place can tell you that the GUI was not invented by Xerox PARC. They may have done a great deal to push the idea, or perhaps simply been at the right place at the right time, but the basic idea of using graphics as a means to interact with a machine predates PARC by about 20 years.

The group that created Smalltalk (Learning Research Group, LRG) was set up in or about 1971, possibly the year before. 20 years before that would be the early fifties. Sketchpad was from 1963. Engelbart's system is usually dated to '65. But neither of these were GUIs by any reasonable standard. By 1973, LRG had the first Altos and created their first GUIs. I don't know how to get "twenty years earlier" from that.

All this can be read in the classic paper The Early History of Smalltalk by Alan Kay. (A chapter in History of Programming Languages II, 1996. A preprint that may be easier to find in the library is in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, March 1993.) This is probably the most readable and enjoyable scientific paper I've ever come across. And it contains so much good stuff. It is a shame it isn't available online.

Currently, Kay is in the process of donating videos of many of the pioneering systems (NLS, Sketchpad, GRAIL, Smalltalk-72, etc.) to the Computer History Museum (I think), and converting them to digital movies (mpeg, mov?). I hope they will be placed on line.

If you really wanna have some fun, check out Doug Englebart's 1968 presentation that introduced the world to the mouse, chordboard and other interesting stuff.

It should be here (all in streaming video), but I coudn't reach the site now: Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo.

It almost brings tears to my eyes when I watch it. :)

Second that. But is it the demo or the non-progress since then that makes me cry?

There are a lot of myths out there about Apple, and especially about the birth of the Mac. Fortunately, today there is a great source of historical facts for those who are interested or just care about the truth:

Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley at the Stanford Computer History Archives.

Go there to find out that Apple did not "rip off" the GUI from Xerox. For example, a large piece of the truth is that the people at PARC who invented these concepts had to leave for Apple to find a company that was interested in their ideas.

Go there to find out why the Mac mouse has one button.

Go there to find out the reality behind Jef Raskin's claims that he created the Mac. Yes, he started the project. But in his vision, it should not have a GUI, neither a mouse. But he was very much concerned about it having a "programmable calculator-like programming language". Although he did want it to essentialliy have an Internet connection (in the late 70's). Engelbart's NLS was also an important inspiration.

Or just visit that archive to find out about the genuine innovations that were made at the time when a mediocre box called the IBM PC was put together. You don't have to be an Apple zealot to appreciate it, the material there has much more general relevance. But the space of a /. comment is too small to do it all justice.

yes, and there's are a lot more literate programming tools around.
Personnly I'm charmed by Donald Knuth 's WEB, it uses TeX as a nice bonus.

Code-within HTML documenation is a good idea, and not a new one either. It is called Literate Programming. except usually the code is within TeX with a system called CWEB.

I believe your idea of sticking the code and documentation into XML is best however. Then, your code can live in a real database (instead of a CVS repository) and you could do much more powerful manipulations and queries of your code and versions. I use CVS all the time, but it is limited because it really does not know a language's structure.

It is the year 2001. Why do we still write code in plain text files?

It's been a long wait since the first three book of TAOCP came out (in the 80's I suppose). Knuth said it would be a 7-volume series. We always wait for the rest to come out. Here's volume 4. You could check out what will come out for volume 5-7. The contents for volume 4 is there too (including the erratas of vol 1-3).

He said that he'll spend his retirement to write the rest. Wow. Check out his homepage, probably you could help him. If you could give him a "significant suggestion", he'll reward you for 32c. If only ask slashdot offer the same prize for each highly modded post. :-)

Caveat emptor: His book is not for the faint-hearted. It's full of math & logic -- but it's wonderful.

It's been a long wait since the first three book of TAOCP came out (in the 80's I suppose). Knuth said it would be a 7-volume series. We always wait for the rest to come out. Here's volume 4. You could check out what will come out for volume 5-7. The contents for volume 4 is there too (including the erratas of vol 1-3).

He said that he'll spend his retirement to write the rest. Wow. Check out his homepage, probably you could help him. If you could give him a "significant suggestion", he'll reward you for 32c. If only ask slashdot offer the same prize for each highly modded post. :-)

Caveat emptor: His book is not for the faint-hearted. It's full of math & logic -- but it's wonderful.

It's been a long wait since the first three book of TAOCP came out (in the 80's I suppose). Knuth said it would be a 7-volume series. We always wait for the rest to come out. Here's volume 4. You could check out what will come out for volume 5-7. The contents for volume 4 is there too (including the erratas of vol 1-3).

He said that he'll spend his retirement to write the rest. Wow. Check out his homepage, probably you could help him. If you could give him a "significant suggestion", he'll reward you for 32c. If only ask slashdot offer the same prize for each highly modded post. :-)

Caveat emptor: His book is not for the faint-hearted. It's full of math & logic -- but it's wonderful.

All of Knuth's future plans for the series are spelled out on his webpage.

All of Knuth's future plans for the series are spelled out on his webpage.

You're going to fail, dude!

Knuth isn't going to have ready either book in time to help you with your project.

Dancin Santa

Looks like there are SOME interesting uses for these old Metricom modems in Linux. STRIP looks pretty interesting. Still, I'm seeing articles like this that make me think that the newer, faster modems are going to be useless.

Anybody have any more info relating to using these new GS models in peer-to-peer? I just bought a GS model, and I'm looking to get another. I'm seeing people posting on here that the modems are trash now-- but I'm not so sure that's the case.

two points:

1. games have always been hardware-specific. dx8 means only x86 compatible hardware & windows. but i assume you mean graphics-hardware, so to address that directly:
2. yes, developers have to write code for one or the other pixel 'shader' api directly, thus excluding them from the other. this is extremely shrewd business - get developers locked-into your platform, then watch the other competitor's hardware perform more poorly, and eat their lunch too. it's how microsoft has done well, and it's what ati & nvidia are competing for right now. it's not the technology, it's the business of technology.
3. ok, i lied, 3 points. bonus point. there are alternatives which are platform neutral, and higher-level. think of pixel-shading apis as writing in assembly. think of high-level shading apis as writing in c or c++. a better idea than writing in 'shader assembly' would be to write in a high-level language. SGI & stanford both have projects which are, at their core, hardware-agnostic:
   • SGIs shading architecture
   • Stanfords shading architecture

Writing a shader, especially one that requires multiple passes can be a hassle; that is why there are higher level shading languages and compilers being developed. This one for example is worth checking out, if only for the demos.

Some of the researchers associated with Google have been working on identifying similar, but not identical web pages. At a talk I attended, J. Cho described the process of fingerprinting documents (rather than checksumming them).

These papers might be interesting:

• Finding replicated web collections
• Finding near-replicas of documents on the web

Some of the researchers associated with Google have been working on identifying similar, but not identical web pages. At a talk I attended, J. Cho described the process of fingerprinting documents (rather than checksumming them).

These papers might be interesting:

• Finding replicated web collections
• Finding near-replicas of documents on the web

Some of the researchers associated with Google have been working on identifying similar, but not identical web pages. At a talk I attended, J. Cho described the process of fingerprinting documents (rather than checksumming them).

These papers might be interesting:

• Finding replicated web collections
• Finding near-replicas of documents on the web

Anyways, here's an explanation of how their new sound works.

For those of you who think this is interesting, you can also check out meta-level compilation, implemented as an extension to gcc.

And for those of you wondering how useful stuff like this is, it's already caught bugs in the Linux kernel, among other things. So that low-level, tricky race condition that was fixed in the newest version? It might have been pointed out by this tool.

-sugarescent

For those of you who think this is interesting, you can also check out meta-level compilation, implemented as an extension to gcc.

And for those of you wondering how useful stuff like this is, it's already caught bugs in the Linux kernel, among other things. So that low-level, tricky race condition that was fixed in the newest version? It might have been pointed out by this tool.

-sugarescent

That seems a bit unjustified considering that the case is still under heavy appeal and that the government still has a long, long, long way to go before they can call this one "done".

Late last month, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously found that Microsoft had violated America's antitrust laws. In an unsigned opinion, the court held unequivocally that Microsoft was a monopolist that used its power to protect itself against nascent competition. Yet that's not the way Microsoft--and, in turn, the press--spun it. "Microsoft spared: appeals court overturns breakup order, assails trial judge," proclaimed The San Francisco Chronicle in a typical headline. "Gates wins a round in court," blared a follow-up piece in the Houston Chronicle. That spin isn't just wrong; it signals something dangerous. Much as he did after settling the government's first antitrust case with a consent decree in 1994, Bill Gates has been arguing that this latest ruling permits Microsoft to go on as if nothing had happened. That's not true. And now the Bush administration and the states need to deliver that message very clearly to Chairman Gates.

In the fall, Microsoft will launch the first versions of its vision of the future--.Net, Hailstorm, and a new version of its operating system, Windows XP. The bundling of disparate software elements into these new products makes the bundling of Windows and Internet Explorer look like child's play. This week, Microsoft freed computer manufacturers to bundle a different browser with Windows XP. But this concession does not begin to address the questions about bundling raised by the court's opinion. Microsoft has bet the company on a strategy of tying together a vast range of products into a single Microsoft platform. From authentication to instant messaging, Windows-flavored code will do it all. No doubt some of this bundling is perfectly OK under the appellate court's test. And it is possible that the bunch together could be developed consistently with the law. But, given the vast range of functions being tied to the operating system, it is impossible to believe that a fair reading of the court's opinion would not raise questions about some--perhaps much--of it. Microsoft's refusal, however, even to acknowledge the principle in the court's opinion--or to acknowledge that this principle is different from the "freedom" it has consistently espoused--forces the government's hand. Were Microsoft willing to talk honestly about the rule the court has set, then relatively simple remedies, perhaps even a fine, would be enough. But when the company insists that black is white--that its "freedom to innovate" has been unaffected by this loss--then it is hard for a government charged with enforcing the law to ask for anything less than the strongest remedy possible--including a breakup. If the company with the greatest power over the Internet's future won't even acknowledge the law, then the government must make sure it can't use its power illegally to direct that future anymore.

That seems a bit unjustified considering that the case is still under heavy appeal and that the government still has a long, long, long way to go before they can call this one "done".

Late last month, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously found that Microsoft had violated America's antitrust laws. In an unsigned opinion, the court held unequivocally that Microsoft was a monopolist that used its power to protect itself against nascent competition. Yet that's not the way Microsoft--and, in turn, the press--spun it. "Microsoft spared: appeals court overturns breakup order, assails trial judge," proclaimed The San Francisco Chronicle in a typical headline. "Gates wins a round in court," blared a follow-up piece in the Houston Chronicle. That spin isn't just wrong; it signals something dangerous. Much as he did after settling the government's first antitrust case with a consent decree in 1994, Bill Gates has been arguing that this latest ruling permits Microsoft to go on as if nothing had happened. That's not true. And now the Bush administration and the states need to deliver that message very clearly to Chairman Gates.

In the fall, Microsoft will launch the first versions of its vision of the future--.Net, Hailstorm, and a new version of its operating system, Windows XP. The bundling of disparate software elements into these new products makes the bundling of Windows and Internet Explorer look like child's play. This week, Microsoft freed computer manufacturers to bundle a different browser with Windows XP. But this concession does not begin to address the questions about bundling raised by the court's opinion. Microsoft has bet the company on a strategy of tying together a vast range of products into a single Microsoft platform. From authentication to instant messaging, Windows-flavored code will do it all. No doubt some of this bundling is perfectly OK under the appellate court's test. And it is possible that the bunch together could be developed consistently with the law. But, given the vast range of functions being tied to the operating system, it is impossible to believe that a fair reading of the court's opinion would not raise questions about some--perhaps much--of it. Microsoft's refusal, however, even to acknowledge the principle in the court's opinion--or to acknowledge that this principle is different from the "freedom" it has consistently espoused--forces the government's hand. Were Microsoft willing to talk honestly about the rule the court has set, then relatively simple remedies, perhaps even a fine, would be enough. But when the company insists that black is white--that its "freedom to innovate" has been unaffected by this loss--then it is hard for a government charged with enforcing the law to ask for anything less than the strongest remedy possible--including a breakup. If the company with the greatest power over the Internet's future won't even acknowledge the law, then the government must make sure it can't use its power illegally to direct that future anymore.

I never said anything about global warming (including what my stance may be), I merely made a point about logic and what it takes to "prove" that something is true. You somehow take this to be some kind of political stance motivated by the Illuminati. I would recommend that you peruse a few treatise on logic to try to bone up on the concepts you are railing against. The summary of which is that "belief" of truth (as in - the world is flat) and "necessity" of truth (as in - 2+2=4) are 2 different beasts all together. You may really want to read this treatese on modal logic to give you some insight into what positive evidence says of a theories "truth".

I never said anything about global warming (including what my stance may be), I merely made a point about logic and what it takes to "prove" that something is true. You somehow take this to be some kind of political stance motivated by the Illuminati. I would recommend that you peruse a few treatise on logic to try to bone up on the concepts you are railing against. The summary of which is that "belief" of truth (as in - the world is flat) and "necessity" of truth (as in - 2+2=4) are 2 different beasts all together. You may really want to read this treatese on modal logic to give you some insight into what positive evidence says of a theories "truth".

Admittedly, you end up in a position of incredible hypocrisy, given that you've thrown a guy in jail for 15 years for something you're now implementing everywhere, but what the heck, evil overlords aren't above a little above a little self-serving hypocrisy... If one man suffers so that you can write off a huge amount of expenses as charity, what difference does that make? We have one cool evil mastermind in the D.A.'s office in Georgia here folks..;)

Well, maybe that's a little too far-fetched and Machiavellian an idea to actually originate from any gov. institution, outside of the intelligence agencies. But it brings up a wonderfully Machiavellian idea for a counter-suit if the fee is upheld...

First, if you live in Georgia as head of an IT department, bring up the idea of charitable contributions via usage of comp. resources to one of your company lawyers and your CEO. Then, if the lawyer thinks the idea is a possible, your CEO gives assent to the idea, and if you're feeling generous to the world in general, go through the motions of filing paperwork and other legal expenses, and go to the work of installing/setting up acual clients. This first time around, make reasonable claims on actual expenses.

After you've gotten the hard work out of the way, start claiming charitable contributions based on the results of the original lawsuit Georgia filed. You'll either get the fee assessment overthrown, in which case this McOwen guy can use your case results in an appeal of his case, or the fee assessment holds, and you get to save your company potentially millions in taxes at the end of the year! Either you get the good karma of helping a guy avoid cruel and unusual punishment, or you get a nice bonus from your company! Win-win situation all around, folks!

All the fun of twisty-minded plans w/ the self-righteous glow of good works... is there any better combination?

-----
IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
-----

First off; the "size" doesn't really matter. A lot of the article focuses on how the qubits will be XYZ times smaller than modern implementations of regular bits. Well, of course they will be!! The whole thing about quantum computing is that it uses the properties of a single atom; if the infrasturucture were much bigger than that it wouldn't make much sense.

Almost as an aside, the article mentions the superpositioning of 1 and 0. This is HUGE . So what, you might say, what difference is it if a bit can hold a little more information? Think of this: Take 8 qubits. If these were normal bits they would be able to hold any one number from 00 to FF. When you have 8 qubits, they can hold ALL the numbers from 00 to FF. So you can run algorithms on all the numbers at once rather than just one at a time.

Of course, it can only return one number at a time (meaning it might contain both numbers, but when you test to see which number it holds it will return one or the other). There are ways to get around this, though. In the mid 90s Peter Shor at IBM developed an algorithm for prime factorization in polynomial time using qubits. Normally prime factorization is an exponential (or "hard") problem. RSA and almost all widely used public encryption algorithms rely on prime factorization for their security. This is important stuff.

Some proposals for quantum computing use the "tunneling" method described in the article, but my hopes are with the NMR crowd. This seems the most promising using current technology.

And as far as being able to buy this stuff at Radio Shack; I would be very surprised if that happened any time remotely soon. Think about it this way: unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption, and virtually instantaneous cracking of encryption, just for starters? Hmm, I can't think of any super-powerful world governments who would want to get their hands on that and keep it away from anyone else...

It is from Steven Levy's classic, Hackers. This is the best link I could find to the text, Enjoy!!!

Check out The Anatomy of a Search Engine.

You'll probably get a resonable idea at this page:

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.

Also, try a lookup for a bloom filter, which google uses, I think. Most search engines work by inverting the index, and then merging the lists. Taking the intersection of all the keywords gives ou the membership, then you apply ranking to the membership. Pretty simple concept. I don't know of any search engines that use a trie, or use any form of stemming.

-js

And no, it's not automatically a violation of copyright laws to take a four-line quote from a book and republish it, on the internet or anywhere else. See the Stanford Library Fair Use Site for more info.

Maybe because there is no god, and every educated person knows it.

Like Don Knuth and Larry Wall?

but writing say Karatsuba multiplication in functional languages can be a pain

It's interesting that you should pick this particular example. It's one of the early examples in Ullman's Elements of ML Programming , for example, and I don't think it's all that difficult.

The reason I mentioned ML in particular in this context is that ML datatypes can correspond pretty naturally to abstract notions of data structures. Then algorithms on them are often easily expressed using pattern matching. Once again, it is (IMHO, of course), a matter of picking the language so that language issues avoid clouding the real concepts, which here are (IMHO again) understanding how the structures and algorithms are useful and how to analyze their properties. (You are of course right that there are some potential difficulties (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say differences) if one commits oneself to remaining exclusively in the functional realm; however, I don't know if I really believe that this is that much of an issue for a first course in data structures and algorithms.)

(As an aside, let me plug Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures as a reference for data structures in functional languages.)

but writing say Karatsuba multiplication in functional languages can be a pain

It's interesting that you should pick this particular example. It's one of the early examples in Ullman's Elements of ML Programming , for example, and I don't think it's all that difficult.

The reason I mentioned ML in particular in this context is that ML datatypes can correspond pretty naturally to abstract notions of data structures. Then algorithms on them are often easily expressed using pattern matching. Once again, it is (IMHO, of course), a matter of picking the language so that language issues avoid clouding the real concepts, which here are (IMHO again) understanding how the structures and algorithms are useful and how to analyze their properties. (You are of course right that there are some potential difficulties (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say differences) if one commits oneself to remaining exclusively in the functional realm; however, I don't know if I really believe that this is that much of an issue for a first course in data structures and algorithms.)

(As an aside, let me plug Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures as a reference for data structures in functional languages.)

But there are better things you can do with your CPU cycles. There are several actually useful distributed computing projects out there, like the protein folding project others here have mentioned. Or maybe you would prefer to help dseign new genes. Or surely you could find something you might like.

Personally, I think SETI is pointless

It may be unlikely, but least it is theoretically possible for SETI@Home to produce significant results. However, the RC5-64 is guarenteed not to produce any useful (or even interesting) results. It will teach us nothing we don't know already.

it doesn't hurt me at all that if my machine happens to find the key that I get $2000

If you want a shot at winning a prize, you could try looking for huge prime numbers. While that doesn't seem to be particulary useful, at least the money is better. And more importantly, you won't spend years searching for something we already know.

But there are better things you can do with your CPU cycles. There are several actually useful distributed computing projects out there, like the protein folding project others here have mentioned. Or maybe you would prefer to help dseign new genes. Or surely you could find something you might like.

Personally, I think SETI is pointless

It may be unlikely, but least it is theoretically possible for SETI@Home to produce significant results. However, the RC5-64 is guarenteed not to produce any useful (or even interesting) results. It will teach us nothing we don't know already.

it doesn't hurt me at all that if my machine happens to find the key that I get $2000

If you want a shot at winning a prize, you could try looking for huge prime numbers. While that doesn't seem to be particulary useful, at least the money is better. And more importantly, you won't spend years searching for something we already know.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School, not Berkeley.

Lessig's Web site