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... Here's a few pages to get a taste of the style: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner...

Heh! ... Interesting. 8-)

I wish I'd read Roger Kaufman's book before I started programming. It would've helped a lot.

Here's a few pages to get a taste of the style: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner...

Red states: the true welfare whores of the US.

Is this what you mean by red state?

It's a pretty big part of what MS does. Measured as a percentage of GSP (the state-level version of GDP), Mississippi is the 4th-largest net recipient of transfers from other states, which equal about 20% of the state's economy. The only three larger are South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida (a whopping 50% of Florida's economy consists of net transfers).

Maybe this has something to do with it.

Because Google doesn't sell a product for which giving away free stuff for can be claimed as a significant upgrade without a price tag?

Where does Sarbannes-Oaxley say that significant upgrades can't be free? I'd like to see some direct references rather than regurgitated Apple PR releases.

Nowhere - that's one reason why Apple does that for some things. Sarbanes-Oxley does however say however say that your accounting has to follow this http://faculty.business.utsa.edu/jboone/ACC4073_S2006/Cases/TechMall/SOP%2097-2.pdf to the letter - read it through carefully and tell us where Apple went wrong in assuming that for the cases where they ask a tiny amount for an update of an not pre-announced feature this is the safer accounting practice.

For what it's worth, the original four buildings at the University of Texas at San Antonio were designed in the early '70s. Because of the campus riots of the '60s, they were specifically designed with campus riots in mind. The buildings have very few windows, none in classrooms, and have 3 foot square hollow support columns. These each have one or two sides open on each floor, with big plastic knockout panels, and every classroom has at least one of these knockout panels. They allow a SWAT team to infiltrate the building from the bottom floor by climbing up the shafts of the support columns. (The bottom floor serves as a basement for most of the buildings, but the central area is raised such that the second level is the "ground" floor between buildings.)

Of course all that was rather a pointless extra expense since campus riots were a fad that had already passed.

But wanding everybody like they were getting on an airplane (what's next, strip searches with a body cavity option?) sounds more than a bit excessive. The cost-benefit ratio just isn't there. Incidents like this are the exception, not the rule.

In addition to St. Mary's University, you left out the other 4 I could remember.

University of the Incarnate Word

Our Lady of the Lake University

Trinity University

Wayland Baptist University

The rest I remember are members of the Alamo Community College District or University of Texas.

I'm not sure which institute of higher learning would like to take credit for this, but you never know. I keep having to remember to toss logic out the window at work, why not with these places as well.

Why doesn't the article link to the official website for The Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS)?

I also find it funny that one could summarize the Slashdot summary as "big hacker showdown, nothing happens". Where's the blatent political slant and blind Linux enthusiasm that we've all grown to know and love? Oh, and I see you trying to hack me !

when the enevitable book,discussion, etc on patterns and their use in software I remind myself of Christopher Alexander , Austrian born, Cambridge educated maths and architecture graduate.

One aspect of Alexanders work often overlooked, is that we should be making up your own patterns. Instead we look to references as cook books rather than as building blocks.

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. -- ChristopherAlexander

Fans of classic arcade gamining who live in Texas would probably enjoy visiting the Videotopia exhibit in San Antonio. It's an interactive museum exhibit of classic arcade games from the 80s through to the mid-90s. They've got all the important games of this era on display for people to play. You have to pay one token per game, but they have a trivia terminal that allows you to earn free tokens if you've studied the text at each display.

It's running until November, so you've got time to check it out. The exhibit is being hosted in the Texas Culture Museum, which is a pretty cool place that was originally built for the 1968 Hemisfair.

This is an interesting line of questioning for a couple of reasons.

First, when Selective Availability was active, people did work up means of getting military-level accuracy and better by using things like differential GPS. (See also a project by NASA. There are many other references from the geophysical sciences community.) It was safe, at least then, because the time needed to get a good position fix was on the order of hours. That rate is fine for geophysics.

Second, part of the political and strategic thinking about GPS was to put assets in orbit so they might serve as a target instead of ground-based systems. That is, the mindset at the time was very much one of fighting a nuclear war. The problem of that was in part seen as one of releasing a cataclysm if the nuclear option was exercised. So, it was thought, if juicy enough targets were put in space, an adversary could use a nuclear weapon to destroy those to press the point of their seriousness home without committing to a direct attack and its devastating retaliation. I imagine that was also true of communications satellites.

The USA actually did conduct some atmospheric tests to measure effects of high altitude nuclear blasts. While the results are classified and these were conducted before satellites were widely used, the possibility of nuclear attack is taken seriously enough that designs for military satellites, including GPS, undergo testing for nuclear hardening.

An alternative to designing software using patterns is to refactor code toward patterns.

This is considered one of the best ways to use patterns by many in the patterns community -- especially to avoid the "little boy with a pattern" syndrome described by many here.

For more on this idea, and on patterns in general check out the Portland Patterns Repository. There is also a conference every year about patterns called PLOP

Finally, the software patterns community owes its origins to the Architectural (think buildings not code) Patterns world. Christopher Alexander is considered the father of patterns. His books A Timeless Way of Building, and A Pattern Language are technical, dry and expensive, but considered fundamental to truly grokking patterns.

You absolutely need the book on Design Patterns by Gamma et al.

Also you should check out the Antipatterns book by Brown et al. A book on "common pitfalls" and more importantly, possible resolutions.

But, if you want to deviate a bit from the technical books, and if you want to expand your understanding of design and design patterns in software, and the philosophy behind it, you might be interested in Christopher Alexander's books and writings. His books are quite old, published in the 70s.

He's an architect (of actual buildings), but his ideas apply to anything that is designed. He developed the concept of "design patterns" and the computer science world has been applying his ideas. Here is a little article about him. It's because of him that we have the following definition of pattern: a solution (set of forms or rules), which solves a problem (resolves a set of forces), in a given context (a recurring sitution). A very general idea.

Basically he was trying to come up what he calls a "Pattern Language", a high-level way to describe design patterns in urban architecture, so that people could basically design their own homes and buildings. But the end result was something more profound and philosophical. Very interesting stuff but rather touchy-feely at times. For instance when he talks about the QWAN (quality without a name, the mystical sort of "beauty" that a good design has).

He also has (or he's still working on, I'm not sure) a recent multi-volume work called "The Nature of Order". I want to read it and I bet it's a much more interesting and insightful book than Wolfram's recent giant tome about a "new kind of science", and without the hype.

Disclaimer: I'm just getting into this type of stuff so I'm not 100% aware of all the history, etc., but Alexander's the name I see everywhere.

The program I'm referring to is called Teach for Texas. You have to commit 5 years to teaching in a critical need area or subject, tech is one of them. I'm a college grad who's been teaching with no certification. Hopefully I will be attending UTSA this fall on this program to get my cert. The website says what colleges, subjects and areas are approved.

Here is a list of online books and references which I found useful:

• Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation -- David S. Touretzky
• Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp -- David B. Lamkins
• CLtL2: Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition -- Guy L. Steele
• HyperSpec: The ANSI Standard for Common Lisp -- Kent M. Pitman
• CLOS: Common Lisp Object System -- Daniel G. Bobrow et al
• MOP: The Meta Object Protocol
• CLIM2: Common Lisp Interface Manager 2.0
  The CLIM perspective, user's guide, and specification.

Following that last post, I decided that instead of continuing this flamewar indefinately, I'd actually do some quick research on the web. The following is what I pulled off the first few pages of Yahoo! and Hotbot when I searched for "LGN cortex".

Here: "The LGN organizes inputs from the retina, and slows them down before sending signals to the ocipital lobe (the visual cortex)."

Here: "Incoming sensory signals are not simply relayed to the cerebral cortex. Instead, these afferent signals are first actively gated and modified in the thalamus. Our research is focused on understanding the modulation of visual signals in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), the thalamic station in the pathway that subserves conscious visual perception. The LGN presents a single locus where vision, in a broad sense, can be impacted economically before visual signals are disseminated throughout the cortex. All subsequent cortical processing depends critically upon the nature of the signals that are conveyed by the LGN."

Here: "...to learn how information transmission from the retina to the visual cortex through the LGN is controlled."

This shows the information pathways involved in visual processing: retina-Pretectal area, retina-Superior Colliculus, retina-LGN and LGN-cortex.

There were others, but Netscape crashed (naturally) and I don't want to restep the entire search process.

Retina: I meant to check for info on retinal processing, but the search engines are clogged with retina simulators and other unhelpful pages. But I did find this which mentions the preprocessing of which I was speaking in my first post.

Alexander suggests that the designs you produce should be whole and harmonious and appropriate, and they should fit in their environment. So it seems ironic to me that advocates of such a wholistic ideal should tempt people with a reward that people find so irritating. This indicates that something is wrong with the design of the contest.