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Eckel gets it.

Here's more gratis books. Site 1 | Site 2 (Math)

Another reason we haven't gone further in converting the dead trees to bits is because copyright is just so darn long.

99%+ of everything ever published is under copyright now that it has become pretty much perpetual.

Project Gutenberg's site has some information about this. They've also managed to scan thousands of books that existed prior to 1920. I think they are up to about 6 or 7 new books posted per month.

There are also other efforts out there doing essentially the same thing. You might want to check out the Online Books Page for even more titles.

The progress made so far in this effort despite the efforts of corporate interests to destroy the very concept of the Public Domain are really pretty astounding.

A small, finite, debugged code base that deals with security - and no extra security code.

Simple security paradigm with a single simple-logic security test per request.

Identity between what a process can request, and what the process is authorized to do.

Fine-grained access control, with each process having capabilities to the exact objects it needs to access.

Mathematically-found model, that has mathematically provable properties.

The principle of least privelege (Your mp3 player cannot delete your files, your email client cannot listen on any port, etc).

Flexible security: The complicated authorization graph is between processes, and not between users and objects. The concept of "user" is not part of the operating system. This is also achievable because capability systems often have orthogonal persistence, that is transparent persistence (sort of like Hibernation Mode, in its functionality), which tends to be of much better disk performance.

No global namespace: There is no global namespace file system that all applications have access to. Perhaps a database of objects for the user's convinence that points via capabilities to the user's objects which are then passed on selectively. But there is no global file namespace that processes can access. All requests by processes must be carried out by activating a capability, whose mere existence authorizes the request. This instead of activating a system call from a global namespace of system calls, allowing any process to request almost anything, hoping that the security code regarding that request will properly deny that request. The global namespace allows extra communication and exploitation between processes that needn't be possible.

I think you'll probably find some interesting things about the "theory of programming" in theory-oriented programming language texts and papers. Benjamin Pierce has a good new book, for instance:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/index.html

(This doesn't cover computability and complexity, etc., rather, it really is about the act of *programming*.)

Just wondering: why is a piece of ENIAC at UofM when it was invented at the University of Pennsylvania? I'm just curious. Did Mauchly[interesting exhibit on Mauchly] go to UofM?

Just wondering: why is a piece of ENIAC at UofM when it was invented at the University of Pennsylvania? I'm just curious. Did Mauchly[interesting exhibit on Mauchly] go to UofM?

I generally dislike biometrics. In general most biometrics suffer from very poor false-positive and false-negative accuracy. However iris and retina scanners are the exception. Iris scanners in particular are excellent. Read this paper from IEEE: An Iris Biometric System for Public and Personal Use (pdf) That particular paper was published in Feb 2000, however I have seen similar results presented in mid 1998. I suspect that the state of the art has been advanced in those 4 years.

Regarding the accuracy. You cannot quote one accuracy figure for biometrics. There are always two: False positives, and false negatives. False positives are when a biometric is misenterpreted for another persons biometric. The system thinks that person A is person B. False negatives are when a person is not accepted by the system as being that person. The purpose of the system will dictate which false reading is worst. In general you can inmprove one error at the cost of the other error. That 47% accuracy is meaningless.

The important thing to remember about any biometric system is that you must back it up with a second piece of id such as a card (swipe or smart), or a pin. This is true for most forms of strong identification.

KeyKOS solved a lot of the problems this paper describes in the 80s, and its descendent EROS is solving them today (and open source, too!).

Unfortunately, in the 80s people were so infatuated with micros that secure timesharing wasn't a big market, and today people have been living with insecure systems so long they have stopped caring.

The Organization Man: Chapter 16, The Fight against Genius

The fairness of the article is another story. Was it fair to quote Dave Farber as supporting Paladium,
"If we're going to get content on the 'Net, somehow we're going to have to reward the people who put it on there," ? I doubt it. He's a member of the EFF and no one paid him to put HIS web page up. Yet the article quotes him as above and then mixes that up with Pladium as if it had his blessing.

Is it fair to portray the whole debate as one over "protecting" crap like movies and mass produced music on set top boxes? No, it's not but that's what the silly article does. By confusing many trivial things with more serious issues the article makes it look like free software and privacy advocates are simply paranoid. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that powerful corporate intersts are proposing the most unAmerican set of laws ever. Paladium and other "secure" computing platforms pushed by law will result in the most powerful censorship system ever devised by any tyrant ever. All future communications will be electronic. "Secure" computing will insure that all electronic publications will be controled. As the means already exist for document control when needed and those means can be used without coersion, the goals of new "secure" computing laws can not be as stated. Journalists who don't realize this have not done their homework and are incapable of presenting anything in a "fair and balanced" manner.

I'm not a consumer, I'm a citizen. Whenever you see an article about "consumer rights" you know the author is an idiot.

Capability systems have many provable mathematical properties that are very important to real security. For example, one can prove privelege escalation is impossible in a capability system.

Sure, a real life implementation will differ from the design until all bugs are resolved, but its still better than *nix security, where even the design itself has no secure properties that are mathematically provable. Also, since the security code in EROS and such systems is very limited to the implementation of the low-level capability mechanism, the amount of security-testing code is very finite in size, and thus will at some point in time be clear of bugs, and identical to the architecture's design.

One of the main differences between capability systems and systrace for all apps, is that in a capability system, _only_ authorized requests can even be expressed by an application, while with systrace, all requests can be expressed, and if a bug exists in one of the millions of requests' implementations, you get a security hole.

Also, capability systems grant you far more fine-grained security control, and they define processes as entities, rather than users.

Capability systems are also much simpler in concept, and do not have a global namespace such as a filesystem that makes for richer communication between distant entities of the system, even those who are not supposed to communicate.

Capability systems are not volunerable to the Confused Deputy problem that exists with ACL-type systems where you must have applications that 'Change hats' (All apps with 'suid bits').

Sure, here's a couple of surveys:
Marriage Prospects Highest for Urban Women Who Frequently Attend Church, According to Penn Study
Unwed urban moms gain from attending church

You can explain this in a number of ways that don't directly involve god, but, as usual, if you could prove that it directly involved god then you could also prove that god exists, which is rather difficult :). Also, I'll admit that it's a stretch to say that these are the surveys you're looking for, but I would challenge you to consider an appropriate survey and do a search to see if someone has, in fact, already attempted such a survey.

They're probably playing this game like DuPont did with the ' bulletproof' Kevlar vests. First they came out with these awesome vests made of their patented material. All the cops got them. Then a while later, special Teflon-coated bullets hit the streets that could penetrate the vests. Know who makes Teflon? DuPont. But somehow Ice-T got in trouble for just singing a song called CopKiller while DuPont profits off the actual technology of killing cops.

Other initiatives to dilute the bad by raising the concentration of the good have also begun. Project Gutenberg, an arduous effort conducted largely by volunteers, has put more than 400 books online

Try 5,750!

Not that the author wasn't doing their homework or anything.

So sometimes, the right person, saying the right thing, at the right time, can make all the difference

This is so true. My Calculus prof in high school had taught there for almost 50 years. He had even helped out building ENIAC.
Anyway, he made Calc seem like a walk in the park. Started with a straight line, moved to a curve, parabolas, 3D, etc.
Made it so easy, I could never understand why anyone would have trouble with Calc.

Though their EVA is "Extravehicular Activity", it reminds me of the character "Lilith" that appears in famous anime by GAINAX studio, "Evangelion", aka EVA.

Here's the picure of dead Lilith:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Topics/Lilith/ngeL il01.html

Creepy design of Robonaut shares something with this Lilith. Lilith in EVA is an evil angel, but it's very complicated story that you can't comprehend with a few google searches.

Is it coincidence? Or one of NASA crew is cmdrtaco?

I know what you mean, since I've picked up a lot of theory in similar ways over the years. Along those lines, Lambda the Ultimate is a good place to get pointers to a variety of current research. It's worth getting at least some of the theory closer to its source. Have you read SICP, for example? That was one of the books that got me back into theory after many years out of CS at university (the CS I did was pretty lame - mainly learnt Pascal, very little real CS theory).

If you're into that sort of thing, though, SICP is just a gateway drug. Lambda calculus, type inferencing, type theory in general, and much, much more follows, and pretty soon all the mainstream languages are looking pretty pale... It all does give some good criteria by which to compare languages, though, and helps avoid being limited in one's thinking by the language one happens to be using.

BTW, I agree about not teaching closures in Perl to newbies. Perl and Python both have enough hardcoded ways to do things that you don't need to rely on closures, except to be perverse. The more important concept for useful programming is higher-order functions, since they provide a capability that's directly useful in Perl (or any language), and closures can be introduced in that context.

You've probably come across this before, but here's a nice piece about ML's type system from a partly Perl perspective.

This is abso-friggin-lutely right. Dave Farber is no MS stooge. For the uninitiated, Mssr. phriedom, you might check out a couple of links about the man before making a fool of yourself.

jMC

One of the more prominent deaths from virally-mediate gene therapy was Jesse Gelsinger. You are probably thinking of him. That page is pretty comprehensive in terms of describing why he died, and the metabolic defect that they were trying to correct.

The clinical trial that he was taking part in was immediately halted, and there was some soul-searching in the scientific community for a while. But a quick search on gene therapy indicates that it's still quite an active area of research (look here, sort by date).

A while ago, gene therapy was discussed on Slashdot. I found a couple of good articles on the future and hazards of using viruses to deliver corrective DNA to diseased tissue. Follow the link to them from my Web site, unless you're the copyright police! Hope they are helpful.

The dot com bust has given added credence to those who actually advocate this kind of enforced conformity - they point to a free form, more open dot com workplaces as a symptom or cause of the crash, and are using it to crush any new proposal to create a more humanized, comfortable workplace.

I said it to my boss, many times while I was there. "The problem is, you can't treat investment as income."

The reality is the dot.com crash should be brought into perspective now that the same sloppy accounting that caused it is bringing down the big guys. (The biggest gripe people have about Enron is what happened to people's investment in their 401Ks. Treating investment as income again.)

Oh, and you should also try reading William Whyte's The Organization Man, it helps bring modern corporate life into perspective, even though it is an old book.

The logo is pretty good. I've looked at the loser logos and what strikes me is that none of them refer to water. Some nice ideas for logo's are shown in these pictures:

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• Pozzo and Gray first proposed signed executables for the Locus distributed system in 1986 .
• The IBM 4758 uses a signed package mechanism to load executables into the device, Smith and Weingart, 1990.
• Arbaugh built a mechanism for signed executables for SunOS and then FreeBSD in 1994.

Whether or not you agree with Darwin on the subject of evolution, he's entertaining and educational.

No need to go so far as the library. You can find his books here.

Lessig's article is a response to a talk by a well-known federal judge. (Actually, there are a number of articles written in response to this particular talk...) An edited transcript of the talk can be found at: on the web.

I'm sure glad that the USA doesn't ban books with depressing regularity.

• John Lathrop Motley's 3-part history of the early Dutch Republic. Sheds a lot of light on Microsoft vs. everybody else, UnitedLinux, etc. These situations aren't new. The players just have different names--and, fortunately, big corporations don't actually have armies.
  
• The novels of George Eliot. This 19th-century writer is head and shoulders above her contemporaries. Again, in these books you will discover that people haven't changed.
  
• The novels of Anthony Trollope, especially the Barchester series.
  
• Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II. Another historical era with big, big similarities to our own. The explosion of activity powered by the sudden end of censorship in England resembles the 1990s in several ways. For instance: Broadsheet = web page.
  
• H. Rider Haggard. Classic adventure stories. Anna Katherine Green, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux--all early detective novelists. William Morris--peculiar, pseudo-medieval language, but good stories.

In 1997, David Bowie issued bonds to pay interest from his old song royalties. Prudential Insurance Co. of America bought them all. Read about it, and David Pullman, the guy who helped him do it. The offering "allowed Bowie to collect $55 million up front, using some of the money to buy out a former manager and keep control of his music."

Sure, Alchemists were not able to turn various metals into gold, but today, using nuclear physics, we can turn lead into gold and by semi-simple means, carbon into diamonds.

However, I agree with your comment that If DRM can be done at all, it will take a whole lot more money than the entertainment industry is prepared to spend. Yes, gold can now be produced by nuclear reactions, it is just plain easier to go out and dig the stuff up. The entertainment industry will find, eventually, that it CAN be done to manage digital rights, but at such a cost that it just isn't worth it. Hopefully, that day will come long before we all get thrown in jail for letting our friends borrow a digitally true copy of seinfeld that we recorded last week on our PVR. I don't know about anybody else, but I honestly have paid for software, music, videos, etc.. that I want to support those that have created it.

The big problem is that people today aren't creating things that are truly part of themselves. If they were, it wouldn't matter how much money they did or didn't get. The attitude of "yeah, I could do that, but what would I get for it?" is what is keeping the United States of America (and many other good nations) from becoming the best they/we could become. At some point, people have to discern what is important to them and do it ONLY for that reason, because it is important to them. I think if you (and I mean anyone here, not just the one post I'm replying to) look into the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard you will see that his philosophy strikes at why the world wars were fought and why so many people are so disillusioned today.

Eh, just my .02 (inflation adjusted, currency exchange rates, taxes and tariffs may increase or decrease value).

Heads are Gonna Roll: The Lexical Connection Between Capitalism and Death

While doing research for a longer expose on the correlation between Western Economics and the worst forms of human violence, such as war, slavery, and murder, I have discovered a most fascinating bit of history. There apparently is a connection between the economic system known as Capitalism and a killing device known as a Guillotine. The connection may leave your head spinning ;^)

We begin by examining our language, for our language has evolved along with our human cultures. Studying word origins (etymology) may give us insightful clues into our history, the unpleasant parts of which the historians may have sanitized in order to make their product (history books) more marketable. We humans, it seems, don't like to be reminded of our savage origins, or the logical inconsistency of our savage nature.

In this essay, I will begin to explore some ideas I have which may explain our violent culture, which Rutgers University Law Professor Gary Francione says exhibits a "moral schizophrenia", a society which Frank Zappa called "socially retarded" and "dumb all over", a community defined by for-profit media corporations spewing confused doublespeak to unquestioning alcohol anesthetic brains, a culture which, rather than condemning all violence, attempts to justify that violence which suits our own savage lust for blood, fills our bellies, is good for our investments, or guarantees us a cheap tank of gas for our sport utility vehicles.

Contrarily, I assert the premise that a civil and democratic society with a stable population (i.e. not growing) based on the principles of non-violence is the only logically consistent, sustainable, and morally defensible kind, a society where the civil order is spontaneous, arising from social contracts amongst morally responsible beings. This utopian ideal is opposed to our current world, where a kind of fascist order is imposed by gangs of violent thugs with high-tech weapons, operating only under color of an ersatz law imposed by a savage and non-representative elite ruling class.

In my studies and experiences, the correlation between savagery and our dominant religious beliefs were always clear (the topic of a different essay!), but at some point I began to formulate a hypothesis that there may be more to blame than just religion as the source of Western violence.

During my research, I discovered that our happy, G-rated, warm and snuggly word "capital" shares it's roots with the not-so-splendid word "decapitate". "How curious!", I thought. What could be the common thread connecting these things? Any ideas? Well, it turns out the key is right inside your head.

Well, not inside exactly. It's in all heads. It *is* all heads, in the abstract sense: a roundish bone covered with flesh and hair containing eyes and a brain, the center of consciousness of an autonomous creature possessing the animating force, which roams the earth of its own free will, self-aware, and aware of its surroundings.

So where the hell can I be going with this, you ask!

Well, open up any dictionary, and you will learn that the Latin root of the word "capital" is "capitalis", from the Indo European "kaput", which means head. Remember the guillotine we spoke of before? This is a device used for decapitation, where the unlucky victim loses his head. Are you beginning to see how this all fits together?

Now our Economic System has become a "sacred cow", so to speak, as the people who criticize it are labeled the most horrible names. All of us who grew up in America were taught from the earliest age the evils of "Communism", a rival economic system, but never told exactly why it was evil. During the 1950s and 1960s, Senator Joseph McCarthy lead one of the largest witch-hunts in modern history, and many professional actors and musicians were blacklisted as being suspected members of Communist organizations.

But because we enjoy challenging the herd-think, let's see if we can find other lexical connections between our economic "sacred cow", and death. Perhaps it will lead us to some other sacred things which are often overlooked, even trampled upon by the stampeding mob, so obsessed by greed, so absorbed with getting stroked by Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of self-interest, they can't even hear the cries of those they hurt, or don't think those others matter. Perhaps they simply don't care.

But maybe, just maybe, Adam Smith and all his followers (like Ayn Rand) are wrong. Perhaps selfishness, since all life is connected, is a kind of self-hatred. And since self-hatred seems to often lead to self-destruction, those of us who actually enjoy life and feel it is worth living, and worth sustaining, want to see self-hatred transformed by love into something better.

Every man, woman, and child, every smelly leper, every prisoner, every bird, every bee, and every cockroach and spider are all perfect reflections of the Divine Spirit, so perhaps the greed embodied by Capitalism is a kind of blasphemy, perhaps a capital offense.

Which provides a nice segue back to our topic! A "capital offense" is a crime deserving the death penalty, a possible sentence for which is when the accused heads off to the guillotine. Notice however, that a capital letter is at the head of different sort of sentence. A Capitol is where the head of the government lives, which is (hopefully) a man with a good head on his shoulders. Finally, in Russian, a thing which is "kaput" is as dead as Marie Antoinette. If you begin to see how this all fits, go the the head of the class!

But all of these capital-death denotations come from etymological connection between the word "capital" and the word "head". But from where does this connection derive?

The Cult of the Cow: Capitalism and The Idea that Things with Eyes and a Brain are Ownable Property

The connection between capitalism and the Indo European word for "head" comes from another nexus, that between economics and cows. From antiquity to the present, cattle have been referred to "heads of cattle"; even the word Cattle derives from "chattel" also from the Indo European word for head. Note the word "chattel" has been used to refer to "animal property" (horses, pigs, sheep, cows, and yes, even human slaves), for hundreds of years. Heads are Money, or so our language seems to be telling us.

The capitalism-cow connections are endless: A successful business venture is a "Cash Cow". When investments are growing, it's a Bull Market. When you are exhausting some resource, you are "milking it for what it's worth". While not explicitly a cow connection, the phrase "making a killing" (meaning making a profit) may indirectly refer to the slaughter of innocents for profit, to sell to those that crave the taste of blood.

There are connections to other animals, and slavery: one United States Federal Reserve Note (a/k/a, a dollar) is also called a "buck", a unit of money. But a buck also means a male deer (a unit of food to a carnivore), and is also slang for a male slave.

Now I'm losing some of you right now, because you say the Bible allows killing animals. We need meat in order to be healthy. Animals aren't moral agents, and don't have souls. We've always exploited animals for our gain. Look at nature! Big fish eating little fish...

But I argue that the same idea that allows ownership of a cow, allows for the ownership of a man. And if you think that slavery is gone from the modern world, you are not seeing the forest for the trees. The same notion that allows for the killing of a cow for selfish reasons, can be used to justify killing *any* creature, or *any human society*, for those same selfish reasons.

Isn't it time for the cycle of violence to stop?

Even the word "stock market" derives from the slave trade, where "livestock" was sold at auction. Now this word only connotes non-human animals, but historically it was applied to human slaves as well. There are still remnants in our language of this. Today, human prisoners are kept in holding devices or cells called stockades or a bull pens.

Thus, cows, prisoners, slaves, and those murdered by the state for their crimes, are all connected in this way, not just to the roots of word Capitalism, but also to the Capitalist idea which treats each of these creatures as beings not of their own right, but ownable property, having no self interest nor the power of self determination, but existing only to serve the interests of their owner, the Master or the State.

We humans claim to be smarter than the animals, "higher" than those savage brutes. So why can't we use our heads for something more than a place to park our John Deere ball cap, and figure out a way to formulate peace? Can't we create a new economy which does not rely upon dominination of the weak, and explotation of those creatures which don't speak our language?

End.

Here's my situation: I have a dual-booting Linux/Win98 machine at home, a Win98 laptop, a Linux server sitting in some network in a galaxy far, far away; and a bunch of other computers around the world.

At one point, managing all my data (I would change a bit here, and a bit there, then try to copy and synchronize by hand) was manageable, but I got real tired of it real fast. I considered putting together a CVS server, and then synchronizing that way, but it's really overkill and not a very user-friendly solution anyway.

Enter Unison. Now I just have a few directories designated as shared, and they get synchronized by Unison automatically. At home, my data is on a FAT partition, which is accessible to both Linux and Win98.

The good thing about this is that since I synchronize with the laptop when I'm connected, I get to use my data even when I'm on the move - not so with NFS. And I get free backups as well - I do have roughly 2Gigs of data, which would be a hassle to backup any other way. Besides, if I took tape backups, I would have to manually carry them off-site in case of a fire; now Unison takes care of backups to and from my remote machines.

Oh, and by the way, the code breakers at Bletchley Park didn't invent the computer - Charles Babbage did that a great many years earlier.

The WHO's clinical-case definition for AIDS in Africa (adopted in 1985) is not based on an HIV test or T-cell counts but on the combined symptoms of chronic diarrhea, prolonged fever, 10 percent body weight loss in two months and a persistent cough, none of which are new or uncommon on the African continent.

With the WHO's definition of AIDS it is scary if people were to actual receive the drug coctail based on that diagnosis (I don't know -- maybe they wouldn't). AZT kills people -- it is a very harmful drug, and if they didn't have something that looks like American AIDS before they start taking AZT, they will after.

I'm afraid this is one place where the activists have been a very negative influence. The attacks on Mbeki were intense and they totally ignored his reasons. IMHO, AIDS in non-risk populations hasn't, isn't, and won't be a serious health issue here or in Africa -- but people have formed their identity around the disease, and that makes it very hard for them to let go.

John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer from the Penn Library.

Um, I think I heard that they were not only first computer programmers, but they were the *first programmers*, ever. The word didn't exist before, or something like that.

Considering the period when most healthy young men were in the military, it does not seem too surprising.

BTW, This is another good source.

Here is an article on the book describing the Difference Engine and the quest to build it from the blueprints using only the available technology of Babbage's time.

Would the Arabs hate America so much if TV and radio wasn't around? Of course not

We have to import all this oil from the Middle East. If OPEC joins together and double prices, the US is in real trouble. Keeping them squabbling, sowing mistrust and throwing in wildcards (thousands of US troops permanently based in Saudi) and you've got one heck of a poker game where nobody can trust one another despite being friends.

Just think about the oil and remember your Game Theory lectures. Then you'll understand *exactly* what the US foreign policy is geared towards (scientists: hydrogen cars please, ON THE DOUBLE). In case you think the Middle East is a picture of freedom, you should see Saudi prisons, Saudi justice (prisoners starved, torcher of genitalia, flogging, daily whipping with wounds only partially healed (whipping of scabs)) BUT their crime levels are virtually zero. Off-ramp near Mecca states, "off-ramp 26, Mecca (Kabbah), MUSLIMS ONLY". Without becoming flamebait, I'll say that I note that the Church of the nativity has no "Christians only" sign. My test of extremism: mention Salman Rushie and say that he is an author that epitomises our modern times by reinforcing constitutional freedoms. Anyone that turns and shows hostile feeling is tagged as "foe - probable extremist" in my book.

Score: -1, Informative, but I don't wanna hear it, plus the CIA Magic Lantern will know if I mod this up.....

If you are too smart or too creative, the public school system will do its best to break you down and even destroy you if necessary. (The public school system also serves a necessary secondary function of being a substitute parent for families in which both parents have to work.)

I think you will find that the majority of brain surgeons have never set foot in a public school. (I think you will also find the same thing about most presidents, governors and senators.)

This is the way I think the system was set up. Basically, the people who run the public school system figure that the vast majority of people are going to be stooges. You know, lackeys, minor functionaries in one of the big bureacracies that make up our society. Sure, every generation needs a few leaders but they figure that's what private school is for.

So the public school system knows that if you are there, you are a mere cog, and they do their best to keep you a cog. The last thing they want is for someone to be a rabble rouser or malcontent.

Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.

Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1
part 2
part 3

Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.

Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1
part 2
part 3

Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.

Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1
part 2
part 3

They might also want to mention the ENIAC-on-a-Chip project.

Interesting web page about the genetic contribution to myopia here.

We defeated a nation controlled by left-wing ideology in WWII...

And that nation would be....? The Nazis were anything but left wing. They suppressed the socialist and Communist parties and followed no policies of their own that were founded on Marx or any socialist philosopher or economist. As for Italy and Japan, they were as right-wing as you could want.

Yet at the same time this same "liberal" is generally very much in favor of things like socialism.

You do not appear to know anything about liberals or socialism. Very briefly, socialism advocates public ownership of industry. All of the big Washington liberals (Kennedy, Lieberman, Clinton, Daschle, etc.) are solid free marketers.

Authority that is not accountable and vulnerable to the will of the people is tyrrany.

Every liberal and conservative and all shades in between agree with that bit of bombast. And that "will of the people" demogoguery doesn't sound anything like libertarianism. I thought libertarians were suspicious of mass movements and mob psychology that threaten the rights of individuals, dissidents and minorities. In any case, the Founding Fathers thoughtfully set up an independent judiciary as a check on the will of people in case it ever got out of hand, which it often does.

> So let me get this straight - you think I have been brainwashed by watching TV but you know the truth.
> May I ask where you learned this truth? Was it from TV? Was it from a newspaper? Do you honestly think
> the press in your country is fair and impartial but the press in mine isn't? It sounds like you have been brainwashed.


> May I ask where you learned this truth?

Sure! I read around. I went to a library, I read some history books. I spoke to people living in countries
like Israel over the net. I had the fortune to speak to a holidaying Isralie in person on New Year's.
He didn't have a good thing to say about the US. He was happy the towers fell like a cheap tent.
For the record he didn't like Palestinians, or the war between the two Races.
And yes, he'd served time in the military.

> It sounds like you have been brainwashed.

Yet I'm the one who's got something to say apart from "Kill terrorists, the US rocks, if you disagree you're obviously
wrong!"


> Where exactly are you talking about? Saudi Arabia?
> Do you think we erected any bases without permission?

I'll concede here. I couldn' find out much about US military bases in the 20 mins I spent looking.
My personal opinion, however, is that your military presence in many countries is unwelcome and resented by the common
populace.



>No, I don't we are innocent. But I do think that we try to be good.
> What separates me from you is that I actually vote for people who I think
> will make the right decisions in my name regarding our relations with other countries.

LOL. I'm 20 and I've voted in about 6 elections all up, 1 of them a federal election another 1 a by-election.
I feel I voted for the most responsible candidate, that's what elections are (technically) about.
Contrary to popular belief, the US isn't the only country on the planet to have democratic elections.
Hell, isn't it true that 25% of your citizens vote in elections ? Over here, (Australia) it's compulsary.

What seperates you and I is blind Nationalism.


> I know it doesn't always work but what else can I do?
> The point is I try to do the right thing.

Agreed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you, yourself do a thing, apart from vote every now and then.
You could give blood, you could give money, or join the Red Cross or some other charity organisation.
Odds are you've got a job and a life though, which rules these out. In that case you could educate yourself
and your friends on *why this all happened in the first place*.

> The terrorists on 911 did the opposite - the tried to kill innocent people.
> Doesn't that make any sense to you?

Does it make sense to me ? Yes it does. Those people were not innocent of electing governments.
Governments who,by their actions brought this upon themselves and their citizens. Why was the US attacked
and not (not so great) Britan, Iraq, Canada or some other country. Consider that.

They may be extremists and Terrorists, but the world works on cause and effect.
That they use brutal, 'underhand' tactics is part of terror warfare, they don't have large organised armies to
mount an assault with.

> What would you suggest we do in response???

Hold an international summit on US foreign policy ? Oh that's right, you're above peer review.
Rooting out and destroying the Taliban was logical. Now there are wars in the Israel area which you support.
Making an effort to solve these problems beyond 'killing all threats to US citizens' might help too.
Stop screwing over so many countries, weather this be through trade sanctions, supplying arms or whatever else.


>I definitely think you are the one who is brainwashed.
Keep telling yourself that mate :o) In the meantime, get an education.

General Links
Why is America Hated in the Middle East?
ATTACK ON AMERICA: AN ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE (Professor Ali Khan,Washburn University School of Law)
The Cost of Israel to U.S. Taxpayers


-- Human Rights Links --
U.S Foreign Policy and Human Rights
Organization of American States human rights panel opposes Bush policy on POWs
Human Rights Watch.
Human Rights and the Drug war.
Afghan prisoners arrive in Cuba
Amnesty International USA

I nominate the de Casteljau algorithm for frame independent generation of curves and surfaces from control points by interpolation between the points.

The algorithm sits on a mathematically rigorous foundation in affine (i.e. "frame independent" or "not based in a particular coordinate system") geometry, the study of which is quite fascinating (and complex) and highly recommended. (Book plug: Curves and Surfaces in Geometric Modeling by Jean Gallier. ISBN 1-55860-599-1. Heavy theory-- this is a math book. However, it directly applies to computer graphics.)

Implementation of the algorithm and its extensions (such as the progressive version known as the de Boor algorithm) gives us polynomial and Bézier (spline) curves and surfaces and subdivision (which gives the CS implementor control over level of detail).

Perhaps a reader can help elaborate on this and other algorithms in the curves and surfaces domain?

One of the many wonderful things about ssh is that is provides many interfaces to the same protocol. The ssh protocol combines file transfer, remote shell access, port forwarding, encryption and compression all on one port/service. That means when you turn on the ssh port, you can access it using an interactive shell (ssh), or an interactive file transfer session (sftp) or an automated file transfer session (scp). WinSCP truthfully acts more like a GUI ftp client, but, when it comes to ssh, what's in a name?

For file synchronization, look into rdist, rsync, unison, and of course NFS, AFS, etc.

Ok, no more alarming news, lets consider what will change in GNU/Linux, for example:

• Can't show/edit any kind of image, even icons
• Can't play/edit any kind of music
• Can't show/edit any kind of text
• Can't show/generate any kind of printable content
• Can't browse (pages might be copyrighted)
• Too many things to list here

But maybe there's a way out. What if Free Software license allows only the creation of non-copyrighted material? Of course that Free Software should create brand new file formats, but I think that it's a way out, isn't it?

Maybe we may also exclude our names from our codes, as stated by R. Polk Wagner even reputation increasements maybe configured as commercial activity.

That isn't painful with unison. I use this to sync my laptop and desktop. Unlike rsync, unison can propogate changes in *both* directions. This allows me to keep my home directory consistent. And for the paranoid, it can even be used over ssh.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-c hap16.html

Sorry, I'm posting this from work!

Here are some quotes:

Why? The failure to recognize the virtue of purposelessness is the starting point of industry's problem. To the managers and engineers who set the dominant tone in industry, purposelessness is anathema, and all their impulses incline them to highly planned, systematized development in which the problem is clearly defined. This has its values. If researchers want to make a practical application of previous discovery--if a group at GM's Technical Center want a better oil for a high-compression engine, for example--they do best by addressing themselves to the stipulated task. In pure research, however, half the trick is in finding out that there is a problem--that there is something to explain. The culture dish remained sterile when it shouldn't have. The two chemicals reacted differently this time than before. Something has happened and you don't know why it happened--or if you did, what earthly use it would be?

By its very nature, discovery has an accidental quality. Methodical as one can be in following up a question, the all-important question itself is likely to be a sort of chance distraction of the work at hand. At this moment you neither know what practical use the question could lead to nor should you worry the point. There will be time enough later for that; and in retrospect, it will be easy to show how well planned and systematized the discovery was all along.

He couldn't do otherwise. Management has tried to adjust the scientist to The Organization rather than The Organization to the scientist. It can do this with the mediocre and still have a harmonious group. It cannot do it with the brilliant; only freedom will make them harmonious. Most corporations sense this, but, unfortunately, the moral they draw from it is something else again. A well-known corporation recently passed up the opportunity to hire one of the most brilliant chemists in the country. They wanted his brilliance, but they were afraid that he might "disrupt our organization." Commenting on this, a fellow scientist said, "He certainly would disrupt the organization. He is a man who would want to follow his own inclinations. In a laboratory which understood fundamental research, he wouldn't disrupt the organization because they would want him to follow his own inclinations. But not in this one."

Even when companies recognize that they are making a choice between brilliance and mediocrity, it is remarkable how excruciating they find the choice. Several years ago my colleagues and I listened to the management of an electronics company hold a post-mortem on a difficult decision they had just made. The company had been infiltrated by genius. Into their laboratory three years before had come a very young, brilliant man. He did magnificent work and the company looked for even greater things in the future. But, though he was a likable fellow, he was imaginative and he had begun to chafe at the supervision of the research director. The director, the management said, was a rather run-of-the-mill sort, though he had worked loyally and congenially for the company. Who would have to be sacrificed? Reluctantly, the company made its decision. The brilliant man would have to go. The management was unhappy about the decision but they argued that harmonious group thinking (this was the actual word they used) was the company's prime aim, and if they had promoted the brilliant man it would have upset the whole chain of company interpersonal relationships. What else, they asked plaintively, could they have done?