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There is.

TWO FRIENDS ARE DRIVING HOME after a night on the town. A few miles from their freeway exit, they see a sign that reads “Drug Checkpoint 1 Mile Ahead.” There is nothing to worry about—neither party is carrying contraband and the driver is sober. But their exit is only a few miles away and the weary travelers want to avoid the hassle of a stop. The driver takes the first exit he sees after the sign; much to his surprise, he encounters a drug checkpoint located at the bottom of the off-ramp. The bewildered driver turns to his companion and asks; “Can they do that?” Regardless of whether law enforcement can use such tactics, they have.

https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sci...

Well, it's kinda funny...

Many state attorney generals and even attorney generals of the United States have at times declined to defend a law and this practice goes back more than 200 years. When they do this, the court can solicit an interested party to conduct the defense. As a practical matter there is no duty to defend if it is not enforced.

Ex Parte McCardle and the Attorney General’s Duty to Defend Acts of Congress:

https://www.usfca.edu/uploaded...

More fundamental CS though: http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galle...

I haven't seen any clear way to calculate say an integral using something like c++ or c#.

You can approximate an integral by dividing the area under a curve into many trapezoids (the more the better), calculating the area of each one, and adding them together: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezoidal_rule

There is a nice parallel example in Parallel Programming with MPI. From that page, you can download the C source code and look at chap04/trap.c

Complex numbers are important in so many aspects of math and physics, and despite the name they are not so complex. This book has a lot to teach even those who think they know complex numbers well, since most of us never learn much about the geometry of these numbers. And for those new to the subject, this is an endlessly stimulating introduction. available here at amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Complex-Analysis-Tristan-Needham/dp/0198534469 also see the author's page about the book here: http://www.usfca.edu/vca/ Also, I'll throw in the Feynman Lectures on Computation, since it is a nice introduction to the physics of computing; plus it's hard to go wrong with anything by Feynman.

Have you considered Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham? It might be too low-level, I don't know. I also second the suggestion of Penrose's "Road to Reality"

PyQT is the nicest Python GUI framework, and QTDesigner makes it just as easy to use as Visual Basic. Check out http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~afedosov/qttut/ for a short tutorial.

In 1983, there were 50 companies that owned nearly all of the major US media sources. Today, only five corporations, "The Big Five," absorb the lion's share of the 37,000 different media outlets (daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies) in the United States. According to Bagdikian, the number of media companies dropped drastically due to many recent mergers and acquisitions. In 1983, the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal involving the Gannett Company, a newspaper chain, which bought Combined Communications Corporation, whose assets included billboards, newspapers, and broadcast stations. Then, during the 1990s a small number of America's largest corporations purchased more public communications power than ever before. In 1996, Disney's acquisition of ABC/Capital Cities was a $19 billion deal -- 56 times larger than the 1983 deal. In 2001, AOL's acquisition of Time Warner dwarfed even this deal at $182 billion, ten times the price of the 1996 Disney deal and 537 times the price of the Gannett merger.

[...]

99.9% of the 1,468 daily newspapers in the United States are the only daily in their cities. As Bagdikian explains:

That 99.9 percent of morning papers are monopolies in their own cities understates the problem. Owners exchange papers with each other or buy and sell papers so each can have as many newspapers as possible in a geographic cluster. This permits individual owners to have something close to a monopoly for daily printed advertising in that region and in many cases to use one regional newsroom to serve all their papers in that cluster.

(1) ensure that the parent company is never cast in a negative light, and (2) find ways to plant positive news items about the parent company. Bagdikian details several examples in which journalists were fired and stories killed simply because the subject was in some way injurious or potentially injurious to the parent company. For instance, a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that 33% of all editors working for newspaper chains said they would not feel free to run a news story that was damaging to their parent firm.

See the flamewar on the OSI mailing lists; all the above concerns and more have been aired.

No, seriously... large complex component-based software system + GPL = instant holy wars, because the line where one work ends and another begins is no longer clear.

"Dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not an attorney!", but it seems to me that in practice, the GPL's process-boundary condition becomes little more than a performance issue because you have to use message passing over some kind of communications link instead of loading in-process. For additional flavor, release the "client side" of the message passing bits under the AFL or similar, and the "server side" obligingly under the GPL.

is terence parr's mantra: http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/papers/mvc.template s.pdf

i've used his http://stringtemplate.org/ in a webapp with pretty good results...even if stringtemplating is itself a form of programming, at least it keeps java out of html:-)

Despite the generated jokes about dogs and the French, and the "oohing and aahing of the crowd at the AIBO robotics soccer games broadcast on U.S. national television, this is not merely "cute". This may be the most important research that you have ever read about.

Researchers Luc Steels and colleagues at Sony's Paris Computer Science Laboratory in France have performed a series of remarkable experiments demonstrating the development, from naught, of spoken language among robots. Words, grammar and semantics evolve spontaneously among cooperating robotic agents initially programmed with a small base set of ground perceptions and behaviors. And from the development of language arises cooperative group (intelligent) behavior.

Enhanced AIBOs are initially programmed to recognise simple stimuli from their surprisingly limited hardware sensors. Over the course of several hours or days, the AIBOs learn to distinguish objects and how to interact with them. A built-in curiosity system ('metabrain') continually directs the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks and to cease activities that are not fruitful. In time they develop more complex tasks, just as do human children.

Like children, the enhanced Sony AIBOs initially babble ("argue?") until two or more settle on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment. Over time the group gradually builds a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate. Agreement on word usage spreads through the population as terms for similar meanings compete for acceptance. For example, the robots develop the language structures to express that a red ball is rolling to the left. Just as human twins sometimes develop a unique language in which only they can communicate, the enhanced AIBOs (which are clone-like and similar to twins) develop their own language.

Language analysis and generation are part of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) and have been studied extensively for decades by AI researchers. In the past several decades GOFAI was challenged by Nouvelle AI (Situated AI) championed by Hans Moravec and Rodney Brooks. This alternative approach holds that true AI will not arise from formal mathematical systems but instead from robotic behaviors which have a subsumption architecture as an overall organising principle for the individual robot. This architecture consists of layers of behavioural modules, each capable of carrying out a complete but simple task. Steels' enhanced AIBOs are embodiments of just such a subsumption architecture and provide strong support for Moravec's and Brooks' hypotheses

Prior to Luc Steels' experiments, no one had experimentally demonstrated how language develops among intelligent agents. Steels' experiments are no less than stunning: in a controlled environment AIBO robots develop their own words and grammars for objects in their environment. All aspects of human language development are mirrored in these experiments: words compete for acceptance in the population, new words are created, and grammatical structures arise spontaneously. Steels' work also addresses the idea of a "robot culture", since it is in the context of a population of cooperating agents that language becomes most useful.

Contrast this with the W3C's Semantic Web effort, which has received much more interest and money in recent years due to the growth of the Internet yet has proven far less fertile. In the Semantic Web there are multiple competing "ontologies" (roughly, data dictionaries wherein all terms are strictly defined by specialists from their

Actually in the graduate math classes I've had, it was pretty much a given that the Grand Dream of Russell was shattered on the rocky shores of Godel. Seems like there was a crisis in Mathematics (due to Godel) as severe as the crisis in Physics (due to QM). It was said that before Physics could procede, a generation of Physicists would have to die out. Mathematics proved more resistant, embraced Formalism, and climbed into its navel instead. (Noteable exception: Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis, also see the book's homepage.

I once was an adjunct professor at USF and introduced programming to MIS students. The first time that I taught that class, I presented a simple, console based balance checkbook example in Java. I watched as the class recoiled in horror at all those curly braces.

For the next class, I presented the same program only this time written in Python. That class was much more comfortable with the Python sample code than the previous class was with the Java sample code.

Softman was a retailer not an end-user. The decision I found was on a motion for a preliminary injunction, which meant that the law had to be read in the light most favorable to Softman. Softman v. Adobe

Oh, c'mon. If our government can build cruise missiles that can reliably fly through the goalposts of a football field after being launched from hundreds of miles away, I don't think they'd be using Bronze age technology for storing our vital public records.

Really? Then how about the IRS's ancient setup? (It's a local cache of a Dec '03 NYT article about the IRS's upgrading woes)

Here's an excerpt:

The I.R.S. says it can still process returns and send out refunds on time, but its dependence on the 1960's-era Assembler and Cobol computer languages makes it difficult to investigate and resolve taxpayers' problems. Finding a record using the existing system can take a week; the new system is supposed to do the job in seconds.

I think most businesses are afraid to change since everyone is comfortable with the staus quo. But that's a whole 'nother discussion we don't need to get into again.

usf.edu is university of southern florida. usfca.edu is USF (San Francisco). The cd was morphix, a live boot version of linux. Also check out cs.usfca.edu.

usf.edu is university of southern florida. usfca.edu is USF (San Francisco). The cd was morphix, a live boot version of linux. Also check out cs.usfca.edu.

More coverage (copied from USF site):
NY Times,
C|Net,
San Jose Business Journal,
NPR,
UK PC Pro
USF News

From a developer's standpoint, I wish that you were correct. It is much easier to write CLI tools than it is to write windows or web based ones.

You propose that the barrier to CLI is lack of an easy search capability. Building some front end to man and/or apropo would be very easy and was proposed in other posts. My own experience leads me to believe that searching for the desired command is not the only barrier to entry.

I used to be on the adjunct faculty to the USF. I taught a class on New Software Paradigms. In that class, I would show some J2EE stuff on a Linux laptop. I ran an X session but sometimes I launched a bash window and typed in some commands to show them what had to be started in order for certain tiers to work (i.e. postgresql, rmiregistry). Whenever I did, I noticed that the students looked nauseated.

These were not developers but they were not ludites either. This reaction did not come from a single class but from years of teaching this class. It was almost as if it was beneath them to type in commands on order to get things done.

I looked up liberty with KDict, and sure enough, I couldn't find a thing in the definition that the PATRIOT Act effected.

Then what you need is a better dictionary.

Back when I was on the adjunct faculty for USF, I taught an "intro to programming" class for MIS students. In that class, I presented the classic "balance the checkbook" program to the students. At first, I would present a program written in Java but the students would get confused with the curly braces. I rewrote it in Python which made it much easier for the students to understand. Perhaps Python is also fantastic for pros too but I know for certain that programs written in Python are easy to grasp for those new to programming.

Which is more 'mindless', 'isolating', 'lonely' and 'arrogant': travelling to Washington to read paper books in an environment where anything you want to share has to be meticulously copied in one form or another, or cutting and pasting quotes with links so that everyone reading it can see the full context for themselves. Furthermore, the Internet in all of its forms encourages interaction between the reader and the writer: comments, corrections, additions. I've learned more from the replies to my comments on Slashdot in any given month than from any single book I've read.

I don't read books in electronic form very much. The hardware isn't as comfortable and convenient as traditional paper books ... yet. I own paper copies of The Hacker Crackdown, The New Hacker's Dictionary and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. When I want to quote them in comments on Slashdot or in e-mail to friends, I don't want to type the quotes every time. And I want to be able to refer them to something closer than the nearest library or bookstore to read a copy for themselves. If my friends are as much like me as I think they are, they do far too much of their reading at hours when libraries aren't open.