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Hey, I never said anything about FoSS :) But do check out ARToolkit (free as in beer).

...they are utilizing probably a tenth of their hacking capacity...

That is false; it's a myth.

Your suggestion sounds strikingly similar to capabilities, which were implemented in a number of machines in the 1970s, e.g. Cambridge CAP.

I want a router running OneSwarm. Or rather, I wish everybody else had one :-). It wouldn't even have to download anything to keep me happy, just as long as it forwards connections.

Biggest problem with OneSwarm currently seems to be keeping the network intact when people have systems that aren't on line all the time.

The P2P replacement "Oneswarm" is F2F, "friend-2-friend" and uses BitTorrent files. Read more at: http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/

Now, you can legally share your own, home-made Word-documents again!

What about fixing the message size bug? And what about proper negotiation of authentication methods? ...
I'm looking forward to Microsoft's new innovations in de-commoditisation of internet protocols and services.

Gmail has what I'd call pseudo-IMAP. I don't remember all of the details, but it doesn't really follow the full IMAP protocol. Read the alpine-info mailing list archives (info at http://www.washington.edu/alpine/alpine-info/) for more discussion from the inventor of IMAP. The one recent bit of discussion I remember is that GMail will unceremoniously just drop connections on people (not time out after 30 mins like expected).

Would be interesting to see the Swedish usage statistics for OneSwarm before and after IPRED.

No it's not illegal to ask about anything in a job interview.

Actually, you are wrong. In the United States, asking the following types questions of a candidate are illegal:

1. Age.
   "When did you graduate from high school?" (legal "are you over 18?")
2. Nationality.
   "What is your native language?" ("Are you authorized to work in the US" is okay)
3. Marrital status/Family Status.
   "Are you married?", "Do you have any children?"
4. Affiliations
   "Are you a member of the Illuminati?"
5. Personal
   "What is your weight?" (legal: "can you lift 40 pounds?)
6. Disability
   "Have you ever had a heart attack?" (this is a grey area though--think airline pilots, etc)
7. Arrest Record
   "Ever been arrested?" (legal: "Ever been convicted of money laundering", and you are applying to be an accountant)
8. Military
   "Did you serve in Vietnam?"

(USATODAY)

Know your rights--keep in mind you may have more depending on the state you live in.

Know that people aren't always aware they can't ask these kinds of questions. You are also free to disclose any of it, like your age, even if they don't ask (many people disclose their age on their resume and don't even realize it. Never add the date when you graduated from high school.)

The key here is that if an employer bases their hiring decision on the fact you served in Vietnam, they are in the wrong. If they didn't hire you as a programmer because you are 45, they are wrong. If they didn't hire you as some hot-shot because you have kids, they are wrong.

There's also this page, which is part of a site all about spider myths.

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/ accusation of infringement is not the same as a conviction, at least thats the way its supose to work.

Seems to me that what is needed is a large number of people abusing this law and lodging false complaints with the aim to deny service to random/ non-random people before the legislators will be able to understand what a stupid law this is. Once enough of their (voting) constituents are adversely affected they'll either rescind it or be voted out of office.

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/

Mmm hmm. "users should be able to flag to an independent adjudicator anything they regard as mistaken evidence"

Of course, I'm making the mistake of Reading The Fine Article, and trying to make evidence-based comments, rather than commenting on what I imagine the law will be like. I'm clearly The Man's bitch.

The TCF code isn't released yet. The draft code had either the ISP judging it or the rights holder (yes, the accuser becomes the judge!). There is no established independent body of qualified experts (well, other than to take it to court).

You might be interested in this list of problems with Section 92A.

1. No Independent Qualified Adjudicator: There's no currently qualified or trusted independent 3rd party to judge (1) data forensics and (2) copyright law, so decisions must be based either on allegation or prosecution. Our positive solution to this is an extension in jurisdiction to the underutilised Copyright Tribunal (who currently handle only licensing disputes, of approximately one per year).

2. Unclear Legislation: People don't know how to obey the law because it's poorly drafted and vague. The heavyweight TCF policy was written by and for conventional ISPs and it is inappropriate for the majority of "ISPs" under the new broad definition that includes libraries, schools, businesses, many homes, hotels, etc.

3. Innocent People Framed: People can be easily framed for copyright infringement online, see http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/ . There are hundreds of Data Forensics experts in NZ that can tell the difference but expecting thousands of untrained businesses to do the same is impractical and ridiculous.

4. Impractical and Technically Unrealistic Demands: Tens of thousands of internet devices in New Zealand are incapable of storing who accessed what, at what time, making corroborating accusations impossible. It would be like expecting, come March 27th, for all New Zealanders to be able to track who used a phone within a household or a business. Most phones just don't have that capability, and most network devices don't have that capability. Accurately tracking copyright infringement is a noble goal to head towards but we're not there yet and therefore S92A is unrealistic and impractical. Government could amend the definition of an "ISP" to be instead a "CSP" (commercial service provider) which would reduce the scope to conventional ISPs like Xtra and Vodafone who are capable of tracking. They could then increase the scope of an "ISP" as internet hardware improves. In the meantime people can still be taken to court as they always could to resolve disputes (or possibly a Copyright Tribunal if that's established).

5. Business Compliance Costs: The business compliance costs of tracking (a practical necessity to corroborate future accusations) both in terms of buying tens of thousands of new hardware devices for the businesses now deemed "ISPs" have not been factored. Consumer-grade internet hardware devices capable of doing this cost approximately $750. We have been doing research on this and we may have some results early next week. It'll certainly be tens of thousands of "ISPs" who need to spend that kind of money... and then you need data forensics and copyright law knowledge to use that tracked information.

6. A Disproportionate Punishment: Internet disconnection is a disproportionate punishment that hasn't been enforced by the courts in the past, even in extreme cases of copyright infringement (repeat commercial infringers as judged in a court didn't get this punishment). Fines would be more appropriate and would protect businesses and home users. Music Industry studies suggesting people prefer internet disconnection to fines did not consult businesses or organisations (many of whom depend on the internet as much as a phone line). Further, the law doesn't distinguish between a copyright infringement such as a thirteen year old's self

they bought them, my friend... http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/ but don't tell anybody!

In general that's true, but in the situations OneSwarm is designed for it's less of a problem. The full details are in the OneSwarm research paper, but here's a summary:

• Most P2P networks have enormous excess capacity - the problem is allocating it efficiently (avoiding bottlenecks etc)
• The popularity distribution of files in P2P networks is highly skewed, so you can save a lot of bandwidth by replicating popular files and looking for nearby replicas (the replication happens for free in most P2P networks because people share what they download)
• Friends tend to have similar taste, so even if you're looking for a not-so-popular object there's a better-than-average chance of finding a nearby replica if everyone connects to their friends

We just need to make sure nobody is friends with the MAFIAA.

Not everybody may be friends with the MAFIAA, but everybody is friends-of-friends with them. Which ruins the whole premise.

Worse, the recommended way to add friends is via their, of all things, Gmail address. And there's a bot running somewhere (I couldn't understand where from the video) that associates those Gmail addresses with IP addresses. So a malicious peer won't even need Google's cooperation to deanonymize other peers, plus it gets their Gmail address, something it couldn't find out over vanilla Bittorrent. As a side effect, Gmail anonymity goodbye.

Read the FAQ:

Does OneSwarm offer strong anonymity? Who can track my behavior?
No.[...]OneSwarm users should trust their directly connected friends [*] and can expect privacy relative to the wholesale monitoring of P2P networks that is common today, but a capable monitoring agent (e.g., law enforcement or government) may be able to infer behavior.

[*] Bullshit. You don't just need to trust your friends (or someone who hacked them), you need to trust their friends and FOAFs too, which will include the baddies once this gets bigger.

You'll find plenty of "friends" on the net willing to trade in porn - or anything else, for that matter.

The question is, who do you trust?

In the case of OneSwarm ...an adversary would be able to correlate the increase in traffic between sender and receiver along an overlay path. FAQ

I can't quite shake the notion that a "web of trust" is inherently fragile.

That as they scale upward and are increasingly interwoven there will be a breach, a tear - that will unravel very quickly.

It is open source. From what I can tell this is a slightly modified version of Azureus, most of the changes are under the hood in a friend-to-friend plugin (I just took a quick look, waiting for the source code). My guess is that the most notable changes are already listed in the white paper

Yes, but can it get us to alternate universes?

(For the humorless, the novel "Twistor" describes an effect sort of like this and is a damned good "hard" science fiction book.)

I can't count how many conversations I have had with techies about things like the 'open wireless access point defense,' the 'trojaned computer defense,' the 'NAT-ted firewall defense,' and the 'dynamic IP address defense.' ...

I'm sorry, but facts are facts and the way things work are they way that they work. I'm sorry, but no, you cannot tie a single IP address to a single person and a single piece of activity no matter how hard you try and no matter how many times you say it. It's a bummer for all those companies selling detection systems that trawl file sharing networks to the RIAA, and it would be lovely and simple if only it were true, but it isn't. It's funny that a lawyer is placing his faith in 'infallible' technology without understanding how that technology works, without understanding that it doesn't provide proof in the way that he thinks that it does and that he's deriding the very people who understand how it works. It won't make systems like this any less flawed:

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/uwcse_dmca_tr.pdf

He mentions kiddie porn, but of course, that's always the politically correct thing to say ;-).

He's right that search and seizure will provide much more solid evidence so I wonder why he even bothers trying to dismiss other technical arguments other than to stroke his own ego about him being 'right'. However, there is ample evidence that there are some pretty terrible trojans out there that will do some pretty damn dodgy things to your machine. You'd have to be stupid and let your computer get in a pretty bad state, but then, most people do. Things are not as cut and dried as he thinks they are in the technology world and it strikes me as rather dangerous when a lawyer starts writing something that says "You're guilty, don't bother" regarding something where he has no clue how things actually work.

There's very little in the way of evidence in that piece of writing for starters and he hasn't 'walked through' anything. Without willingness to back up 'facts' with knowledge of what you're dealing with, whether it be medical matters, engineering or IT, then you're on a rocky road.

Cabintaxi had a novel approach. Pods on top of the track went in one direction, suspended cars hanging underneath went the other direction. From the linked article:

Cabintaxi, a joint venture of Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm (MBB) and Demag, has been the only group in the world to build a small-vehicle PRT system (referred to by some as a "true" PRT). A large test track facility was built in Hagen, Germany, that was used for an extensive testing program conducted from 1973 to 1979. The Cabintaxi technology logged over 400,000 miles of vehicle testing and operations from 1975 to 1978. In 1977 the system completed, fleet operation endurance testing, of 7500 continuous vehicle hours, and again in 1978, of 10,000 continuous vehicle hours, for a total of 17,500 vehicle hours of fleet endurance testing. The fleet was made up, at its maximum in this time period, of 24 operating vehicles over two levels. The Cabintaxi endurance tests are the only fleet endurance test of these magnitudes ever carried out successfully with vehicle separations under 3 seconds.

The German Government considered this PRT development effort successfully completed and ready for urban deployment , but a planned application in Hamburg was terminated for budgetary reasons in 1979. With the termination of the Hamburg project, the participating companies withdrew from the field.

It's possible in theory.

Long story short, "measuring" a photon/electron/whatnot can cause it and it's entangled partner to start behaving as a particle instead of a wave. So you have two entangled streams going in different directions, start interfering with one, and whoever is observing the other will notice it.

Your brain expects a connection to remain viable permanently.

Actually neurons, brain cells constantly make and break connections. Dendrites and axons form new connections through synapses. Some of these connections are temporary. Heck, new neurons even grow in the adult brain and definitely form new connections.

Falcon

Yes, it's illegal when it shouldn't be. And it's not cheap because it's not legal.

Make it freely available, usage will soar and the damage WILL be greater than tobacco.

Alcohol and tobacco are freely available but where's all the damage from them? Fact is is alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana. And while smoking tobacco causes cancer, smoking marijuana "Does Not Raise Lung Cancer Risk". "Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection. However "The effectiveness of cannabis for treating symptoms related to HIV/AIDS is widely recognized."

Would Alpine (the descendant of Pine) be a good replacement for Outlook Express or Windows Mail, in your opinion as well? It might be harder to do damage to a Windows install with Alpine than with Outlook Express or Windows Mail. However, I should never underestimate the power of stupid Windows lusers, though.

I was looking at the page source for this story and found something a bit interesting. I was looking though the page source because I didn't know how to format a link in HTML properly. Which is a bit pathetic on my part, I know. This is the interesting Javascript code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var suggestions_for_context = {
    nod: 'fresh funny insightful interesting maybe ',
    nix: 'binspam dupe notthebest offtopic slownewsday stale stupid ',
 
    metanod: 'insightful interesting informative funny underrated',
    metanix: 'offtopic flamebait troll redundant overrated'
};
var tag_admin = false;
</script>

On this page it starts on line 21, when viewing the source. Anyone have an idea as to what the "nod" and "nix" terms refer to? The terms following "metanod and "metanix" appear to be the usual terms used in moderation of comments. However, I never remember the "nod" and "nix" terms ever being used for moderation. I have been unable to moderate since moderating the "Thread of Doom", but no changes like this have been made as far as I am aware of.

Would Alpine (the descendant of Pine) be a good replacement for Outlook Express or Windows Mail, in your opinion as well? It might be harder to do damage to a Windows install with Alpine than with Outlook Express or Windows Mail. However, I should never underestimate the power of stupid Windows lusers, though.

I was looking at the page source for this story and found something a bit interesting. I was looking though the page source because I didn't know how to format a link in HTML properly. Which is a bit pathetic on my part, I know. This is the interesting Javascript code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var suggestions_for_context = {
    nod: 'fresh funny insightful interesting maybe ',
    nix: 'binspam dupe notthebest offtopic slownewsday stale stupid ',
 
    metanod: 'insightful interesting informative funny underrated',
    metanix: 'offtopic flamebait troll redundant overrated'
};
var tag_admin = false;
</script>

On this page it starts on line 21, when viewing the source. Anyone have an idea as to what the "nod" and "nix" terms refer to? The terms following "metanod and "metanix" appear to be the usual terms used in moderation of comments. However, I never remember the "nod" and "nix" terms ever being used for moderation. I have been unable to moderate since moderating the "Thread of Doom", but no changes like this have been made as far as I am aware of.

I've got a few customers I wish I could do that to.

Now you can!

And John G. Cramer has an article here (and in the December issue of Analog, if anyone has that and hasn't read it yet). This is a very cool theory, indeed, and I'm glad to see it getting more mainstream attention.

I'm puzzled as to how one gets from "the universe may have a finite resolution" to "omfg it's prolly a hologram!!!"

Answer: you don't. You start with a theory that the universe is a hologram (there are sound reasons why this might be so, related to the theory that information is not destroyed on entry into a singularity and the theory that the universe is itself a singularity within, essentially, a larger universe), and then from that you make predictions about the resolution of the universe. When noise turns up at a similar resolution in an experiment, you can see this as confirmation of the preexisting theory.

IANAQP. I just read stuff like this and vaguely understand.

More proof that politicians pass laws to please their political donors and lobbyists, without understanding their implications. These infringement notices have been shown to be unreliable and easily spoofed.

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080605-study-paints-grim-picture-of-automated-dmca-notice-accuracy.html
http://torrentfreak.com/study-reveals-reckless-anti-piracy-antics-080605/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/the-inexact-science-behind-dmca-takedown-notices/

So now any New Zealander can have their internet connection cut if anyone knows their IP address: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/95089

So today's Political Enemy of the Internet Award goes to New Zealand's Judith Tizard, who joins Australia's Stephen Conroy and Britains Andy Burnham. I could handle it when all politicians did was rort the system, but this is getting really annoying. I don't recall voting for any of this stuff, and I'll put them last on the ballot next time.

...when you add -f on the command line. There's a warning about why trying to make commands safe automatically is not a good idea in the Unix Haters Handbook (Changing rm's Behavior Is Not an Option section). Better to have an entirely different command written by yourself that won't vary it's behaviour platform (and at worse will be missing)...

My own cautionary tale (unrelated to the GP) is don't delete directories you think are completely empty by using rm -rf. Use rmdir - it's safer.

Oh and don't use -r if you aren't actually deleting directories. And watch out for GNUisms on GNU userlands - that * might mean more than you think it does on Linux...

I did a Google search for Cyberterm I found Michael's paper about Cyberterm. After reading the paper throughly, it seems to be prior art to most, if not all, claims of that patent. There is publish date of the paper, but the web page headers indicate a date of July, 1992. And the paper talks of release of source code in late '92, and the work that went into the project from the last year. I now have absolutely no worries at all that patent. To borrow a phrase, that patent is BUSTED!

And I wish I had know about the software back then. I was heavy in Amigas at that time. I would have loved to take that software for spin and help out.

If you're going to build an infrastructure, how about this idea?

How about building an infrastructure which consists of two parts. (1) Have a large network of electrified rails which can transport (2) a new type of electric car which can either run on the street via batteries or use this new electrified rail for long distance "freeway" style movement? The vehicle could be something like this... but runs on electric and uses the power from the rails...

That way, the current battery issue for electric vehicles would be solved and this time we can design this infrastructure to prevent accidents with various technologies built in.

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about how this thing works. I can only assume the misinformation comes from the wired article which I can not read (slashdotted?).

Anyhow here are some links I found on google;
http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=3045
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/AN/article.asp?doi=b705672a
http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=LC&Year=2008&ManuscriptID=b811158h&Iss=Advance_Article
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.bioeng.10.061807.160524

I googled 'Washington university blood analyzer DxBox'

The research is lead from Washington University, with grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is apparently 'Open technology', and is currently called DxBox (a play on Microsoft xbox since BillG is funding a lot of the work).

Just answered my own question...

On Neural Nets at least.. The only text book that I can think of offhand which is decent is Duda, Hart and Stork

Hawkins, like many others, has ripped off many of his ideas from Steve Grossberg (in this case, the ART model). Although he's not very easy to read, especially if you start much earlier than say, Ellias and Grossberg, 1975. You should also check out the work of people like Jack Cowan, Rajesh Rao, Christof Koch , Tom Poggio, David McLaughlin, Bard Ermentrout, among many, many others. I think the above names are sufficient to start a survey.

To make sure that it wasn't one of your printers [PDF warning].

You took the wrong courses - plenty of undergraduate econ classes require fairly advanced Math - especially the ones that necessary for being able to succeed in grad school.

The econ classes divide into two different types - 1) the crap where you talk about lines on graphs where the most complicated math involved is y=mx+b. 2) The hard stuff that is required to prepare you for grad school. Most people self-select into the easy stuff.

Here's an example of an undergrad course that most every grad school econ student should have completed in their undergrad work - http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/econ.html

ECON 481 Introduction to Mathematical Statistics (5) NW
Probability, generating functions; the d-method, Jacobians, Bayes theorem; maximum likelihoods, Neyman-Pearson, efficiency, decision theory, regression, correlation, bivariate normal. Prerequisite: STAT/ECON 311; either MATH 136 or MATH 126 with either MATH 308 or MATH 309. Recommended: MATH 324. Offered: jointly with CS&SS/STAT 481; A.

Look at those pre-reqs:

Math 126/136 - 3rd quarter of calculus or honors 3rd quarter of calculus - Introduction to Taylor polynomials and Taylor series, vector geometry in three dimensions,introduction to multivariable differential calculus, double integrals in Cartesian and polar coordinates.
Math 308 - MATH 308 Matrix Algebra with Applications (3) NW
Systems of linear equations, vector spaces, matrices, subspaces, orthogonality, least squares, eigenvalues, eigenvectors, applications. For students in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences.
MATH 309 Linear Analysis (3) NW
First order systems of linear differential equations, Fourier series and partial differential equations, and the phase plane.
MATH 324 Advanced Multivariable Calculus I (3) NW
Topics include double and triple integrals, the chain rule, vector fields, line and surface integrals. Culminates in the theorems of Green and Stokes, along with the Divergence Theorem.

They don't even bother to list differential equations as a pre-req as it is pre-req for other classes listed above.

Many years ago, I took the above mentioned ECON 481 when I was a senior in college (thinking I wanted to go on to grad school). I was very good at math and science I had tested out of freshman year calculus via AP exams (5 on the Calc BC), and physics (5 on the Physics C w/ Caculus and Physics E&M exam), and went on to take second year physics and second and third year of math and done very well in all of them.

Even with all of that preparation when it came time to take ECON 481, it was a struggle - probably the hardest class I ever took.

This is Robert Winglee's M2P2. He Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion. His original idea was to use it as an innovative type of solar sail, but it quickly became obvious that it could be used in the way that these people have stated. All in all, nothing to see here, already been done, and here in the US too. You might also enjoy checking out his page, the guy is a big time plasma nerd.

This is Robert Winglee's M2P2. He Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion. His original idea was to use it as an innovative type of solar sail, but it quickly became obvious that it could be used in the way that these people have stated. All in all, nothing to see here, already been done, and here in the US too. You might also enjoy checking out his page, the guy is a big time plasma nerd.

Actually, not "sadly" really. In Indiana, the state with the most stringent ID requirements, only 85.9% of 2006 voters had an ID that exactly matched their voter registration.

When broken down by categories, the percentages were disproportionate for minority (84.2% for white 78.2% for black voters), low income (78.9% income under $40K vs. 89.3% for income from $40K to $80K), very young/very old (78.0% 18-34 years old 80.6% for 70 years and up, 83.8 35-54 years and 85.9 55-69 years old), and lower education (HS grad 79% vs 88.9% for college grads), and by political party (86.2% for Republicans, 81.7% for Democrats.)

The study concludes:

While the ability of rigid voting requirements to achieve the goal of reducing voter fraud is debatable at best, our results from four separate locations clearly indicate that these requirements have significant electoral implications. Not only does the Indiana law disproportionately impact the communities most vulnerable to changes in the electoral process, there is also a clear partisan bias associated with these laws as well.

Our data suggests that a greater number of Democrats than Republicans or Independents are excluded from voting under Indianaâ(TM)s voter identification laws. This is particularly concerning given the very narrow vote margins associated with several federal, state, and local races in recent memory. While the state interest of preventing voting fraud is an important one, our results here question whether this interest should be advanced despite apparent evidence that this ostensible method of fraud prevention disproportionately impacts specific segments of the electorate.

.

It would be nice if there were distributed projects that were more closely linked to modern mathematics than the Golomb ruler computations. ABC@home is a start, but I'd be more interested in seeing something like a distributed expansion of tables like these fed into SAGE in an automated way. Other computations that might be useful include homotopy groups of spaces like spheres, Groebner basis calculations for various geometric objects, and knot invariant calculations, but I don't know how well these can be distributed. At any rate, I think building a freely accessible database of some sort is a more constructive use of computer time than brute-forcing single instances of ciphertext. Those sorts of challenges were a good cause in the 1990s, when people were fighting laws banning strong cryptosystems, but the good guys seem to have won that particular war.

Rotating fluids that are perturbed tend to form columns parallel to the axis of rotation called Taylor columns, after G.I. Taylor. On the Earth, these are sometimes seen over seamounts in the oceans, and back when people assumed that Jupiter had a surface, it was hypothesized that the Great Red Spot was a taylor column over an obstruction on the surface below. This now seems highly unlikely, as a solid surface seems highly unlikely. Some more theory is here.

More recently, it has been hypothesized that the belts of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn (which are organized in pairs at opposite latitudes) may be Taylor columns (i.e., that they may extend part or all the way through the planet as cylinders, keeping the same distance from the rotation axis). A Taylor column at the pole could in principle go all the way through the planet, if there was nothing below it, or could mark the size of a rocky core, thousands of kilometers down. Thus my original question.

This explains the idea pretty well :

The proposed atmospheric cylinders were first demonstrated in a series of laboratory experiments 25 years ago to chart atmospheric flow in a wholly gaseous planet. Friederich Busse, University of Bayreuth, Germany, and John Hart, University of Colorado, Boulder, used liquid-filled spheres with high rotation speeds and imposed interior-exterior temperature differences. The experiments showed that the convective and most other disturbances in these fast-rotating spheres of fluid almost always produced cylindrical vortices parallel to the test vessel's spin axis, called Taylor columns.

The University of Washington has popular introductory CS / programming courses. The teachers wrote the textbook and the classes have really good handouts and slides. They use an "objects later" approach instead of "objects early" like a lot of universities. All their materials are up and others can use them. The web sites are here (CS 142) and here (CS 143). The book is called Building Java Programs.

One of their instructors also teaches a web programming course that was really popular.

I'd also check out the "How to Think Like A Computer Scientist" series.

The University of Washington has popular introductory CS / programming courses. The teachers wrote the textbook and the classes have really good handouts and slides. They use an "objects later" approach instead of "objects early" like a lot of universities. All their materials are up and others can use them. The web sites are here (CS 142) and here (CS 143). The book is called Building Java Programs.

One of their instructors also teaches a web programming course that was really popular.

I'd also check out the "How to Think Like A Computer Scientist" series.

The University of Washington has popular introductory CS / programming courses. The teachers wrote the textbook and the classes have really good handouts and slides. They use an "objects later" approach instead of "objects early" like a lot of universities. All their materials are up and others can use them. The web sites are here (CS 142) and here (CS 143). The book is called Building Java Programs.

One of their instructors also teaches a web programming course that was really popular.

I'd also check out the "How to Think Like A Computer Scientist" series.

Computer literacy is distinct from networking which in turn is distinct from programming [as has been said]. Don't try to teach them all at the same time, and only teach two at the same time at the areas where the two overlap.

The rest of my post is about teaching programming specifically, not the other two (although it may also be relevant to system administration).

Teaching generative models is crucial. What does that mean? It means teaching the causal connections; for one, between what the code says and what it does, and for two between what one piece of code does and what another piece of code does.

Three interesting reads:

• ESR's blog: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=316
• A study observing students without programming experience answer a test about the semantics of the assignment operation; those who create a model of what assignment does and applies it consistently do better in class than those who don't independent of what the model is (and in particular independent of whether it's the correct model). http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
• "The Mystery of b := (b = false)", a study about the importance of being able to simulate in your head what the computer does. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/reges/mystery/

No matter which languages and tools you teach, and no matter which problems you make the students apply their tools to, help them obtain a generative model, and help them help themselves obtain a generative model.

As for which tools to teach them, I would recommend python. It allows you to go straight to the meat of the matter without having much in the "this part is magic, you're not supposed to understand this". Also, it supports the teaching of multiple paradigms. Procedural and OO programming are its strengths, but you can definitely teach the ideas of functional programming in it as well--it already likes doing things with lazy lists (called generators), such as map-filter-reduce.

There's also a good book, How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, freely available at
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/html/. Be sure to also look in its parent directories.

(There are also other programming paradigms or computational models, such as prolog-style declarative programming, string rewriting systems or cellular automatons; python doesn't lend itself naturally to do those, but it should be simple to write a simple string rewriter; besides, I wouldn't suggest teaching esoteric computation paradigms).

So my vote is Python, How to think like a computer scientist, and a lot of attention to the generative models.

If you need an example of real-world python, I'd suggest the official bittorrent client (it'd also give you a good excuse to talk about networking if you feel like it).

Also, try to take something the students already know how to do and show how they are following an algorithm; make them implement the algorithm. Math should be rich with examples (gaussian elimination, computing derivatives or simplifying expressions), but the examples may also be a bit on the boring side.

Take this technology and add the technology found here: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement.htm ... and you instantly have "beautiful" actors!... ... and a recursive loop that eventually turns everyone into two actors (one female definition of "beauty" and one male).

Mr. Uzi Nissan started a company called Nissan Computers, way back when Nissan cars were sold under the Datsun marque. It didn't stop Nissan Motors sueing him over his nissan.com domain (which he had properly registered and used for his company). Nissan Motors mostly won in a series of bizarre precedent-setting decisions, and Mr. Nissan is about a million bucks out of pocket in legal expenses.
http://www.lctjournal.washington.edu/Vol2/a002Rozsnyai.html
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=i100302

Our legal system here in the West can be just as bad when it comes to admitting evidence gained from dubious techniques and devices. Nonsense like "repressed memories" actually led to a murder conviction of a man in California nearly 20 years ago. Which was thankfully overturned on appeal.