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Although that's certainly how some people will try to spin it. Venus' atmosphere is theorized to have begun much like Earth's. The crucial difference was its proximity to the sun caused its water to mostly turn into vapor, instead of remain as a liquid. This (1) contributed to the greenhouse effect - water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas contributor on Earth despite only a tiny fraction of our water being in vapor form, and (2) rose above heavier CO2 thus shielding it from being lost into space or being broken apart into its elements by solar radiation (Venus has almost no magnetosphere to protect it).

So Venus' CO2 was allowed to build up instead of being lost to space, eventually leading to the enormous pressures Venus has today. Mars's atmosphere has a similar composition (both are 96% CO2), but due to its weaker gravity and lack of water vapor, most of Mars' CO2 was lost into space giving Mars a surface atmospheric pressure only 0.6% that of Earth's. Venus' surface pressure by contrast is 92 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level. CO2's critical point is at 73.9 bar (atmospheres) and 31 C, above which the difference between the gas and liquid phases disappears. So the CO2 "atmosphere" on Venus' surface is more like a sea of CO2 fluid (the Venera landers didn't even use parachutes for the final descent - they gently floated down using nothing but hull drag). You basically have the greenhouse effect of the CO2 gas, compressed into the higher density of liquid CO2. All made possible by excess water vapor early in Venus' early history.

Earth's early atmosphere was also nearly the same as on Mars and Venus. But Earth retained liquid water, which was able to dissolve most of the CO2, creating the "habitable" conditions for life we have today. So it's actually liquid vs gaseous water which is the key difference, not CO2 levels. In fact Venus' present atmosphere is theorized to actually be much more hospitable. In the past when water vapor was still present, temperatures there were probably twice what they are today.

The local high school requires that every student complete a 'tech' requirement to graduate by either passing an online test or by taking a one-semester 'tech' class. The 'tech' subjects that the students are required to know are not computer languages, file systems, operating system functions, user interface layout, programming, etc. No, the 'tech subjects' are MS Excel, MS Word, MS Publisher, MS Powerpoint, and MS Front Page. The online test displays screens from these apps and then asks the student to select the proper menu choice to perform some desired action. The student gets three trys for each question and then they 'fail' the question and on to the next. Worse is that the test is based on Office XP, not Office 2003. Of course, Office 2007 will have different menus so all of that 'knowledge' will soon be obsolete. Keep in mind that a lot of these kids have parents who work at Microsoft.

Only 1000 students per T1 line??? Your school must have A TON OF MONEY! My school district has ONE T1 LINE connecting 3 schools to the internet! And these aren't small schools. Total their are about 4000 students on a T1 line. It typicly takes 10-15 seconds to load one page from Slashdot... But some how they managed to find the money to upgrade all their computers to Windows XP (Lets just say Bill is "Giving" them some encouragement...).

this

Two in particular I'd like to mention. There are probably a lot of great ones I'm forgetting and terrible ones which deserve to be well raked over the coals, but ... life is short.

1) Math textbooks by John Saxon. Few illustrations, but well written and helpful. As a genuine mathophobe, for me to like any math textbook is high praise. These are often used in home-schooling, while public schools get the books with more pictures and worse grammar ;) Of the few Eureka moments I've ever had wrt math beyond arithmetic, most have come from reading one or another of the Saxon books.

2) The Horance Mann Reader. Since the contents of the Horace Mann Reader are so old, I assume that the contents could be re-assembled via Project Gutenberg or similar ...

(No relation to this strange thing in which books are given to-the-decimal "reading level" ratings. What a crock of bovine excrement.)

I'm not terribly familiar with the HMR other than that I used to own a particular and quite old copy; maybe there are hundreds of different compilations by that title. However, the one I had and loved to read as a kid had all kinds of stories, some with a punchy moral, some simply adventure stories, some with endings I consider bafflingly ambiguous. (Like the one where a maurading giant caterpillar is killed with a spit-wet arrow, and the upshot is something like "There is power is a brave man's spit.")

timothy

How many thousands of years did the Greeks believe that a God named Apollo flew his chariot (that big bright ball of flame in the sky)? Hell, back then, people didn't even know the earth was ROUND.

Not to nit-pick, but "people back then", or at least the educated portions of the Greek population, were aware that the earth was round, and had even estimated its circumference with reasonable accuracy, given the limitations of the instruments available at the time. Eratosthenes of Cyrene (historical info), third librarian at Alexandria, conducted this experiment, using nothing more than a stick and a working knowledge of geometry.

There's even an "Eratosthenes Experiment" website for schools/students interested in repeating this classic experiment and comparing their results with other participants.

I found a link to that story (Bill writing the software that put him in the same class with lots of girls).

I also googled with "myth" and "urban legend" but I couldn't find anything that quickly. (Doesn't prove it's true, though!)

Reinout

Are there Spanish public schools in the southern US?

This is somewhat controversial, and is only for the first few years of schooling, but in some elementary schools some students are taught excusively in spanish for a few years. (That's what "Emerson classrooms encompass both English and Spanish instruction with many bilingual students transitioning to English in the intermediate grades." means.)

silverm@tukwila.wednet.edu

The next thing you know they are going to be taking something like unix and adding a letter to it and calling it the greatest thing sence sliced bread

August 1980: Microsoft announces XENIX OS, a portable operating system for various 16-bit microprocessors. XENIX is an interactive, multi-user, multi-tasking system. It will be able to run all of Microsoft's existing system software, and also be compatible with the programs written for UNIX OS.

[Xenix was actually an OEM version of Unix licensed by ATT]

August 1984: Microsoft announces that it will use XENIX and MS-DOS for its new personal computer, the IBM PC AT. The new PC sets the standards in multi-user systems. Both of its operating systems support the Intel APX-286 microprocessor.

see here and here

As for Linux :
July 1991
> Message-ID:
> Date: 3 Jul 91 10:00:50 GMT
>
> Hello netlanders,
>
> Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix
> standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably)
> machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be
> nice.

I was a student in high school in the Lake Washington School district in the mid 90's. The "LWSD" is the school district which encompasses the Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue area which is of course home to MS. I did a lot of volunteer and paid work for the district, but mostly did sys-admin type work.

The district admirably resisted the MS juggernaught until around 1995 when PCs started to pop up in the schools.

As a volunteer administrator on the district's student run email system (LWO, which is now defunct and to be shut down) http://lwo.lkwash.wednet.edu I attempted to encourage the district to use a groupware solution other than Exchange (even though we were on a NT server ourselves). I felt something more appropriate to an educational environment (i.e lighter wieght) was needed. LWO was a fully functional and operating groupware solution already running to service students. A faculty system could have been easily integrated into the student system. Of course this was rejected and I feel it was largely because an exchange implementation was more or less subsidized by Microsoft and forced upon the district by MS employee parents as part of a mass migration to Windows everything.

Schools are interested in delivering the best education possible to thier students. If they can save money by switching to a cheaper solution (read subsidized by MS to suck you in) they will do it. By the time they realize what is going on it's too late. A large part of this is the repercussions of the tech boom of the 90's. A lot of GOOD tech people who would have gone to work in the education field instead went into the commercial sector. K-12 schools got stuck with the bottom of the barrel in terms of technical personnel, people who were really not up to the job or understood the long term ramifications of what they were advocating. Now you are seeing the results, total and complete Windows domination and little chance for inroads by anyone else.

It began prosaicly enough.
Randal Schwartz, who I knew from Usenet and his
very successful books on the Perl language,
was on business in Silicon Valley and agreed to meet me at
Frankie, Johnnie & Luigi Too,
an Italian restaurant in
Mountain View CA, to offer me advice for a program I was
writing.

It might seem surprising
that Randal would agree to take time
from a hectic schedule two weeks before going on trial to give
what amounted to free consulting to a stranger.

However, those who
have been interested in the Perl language for a while
know that Randal
is a legend for his generosity.

Actually, I didn't know Randal was going on trial in two weeks.
I had heard rumors that he had some sort of legal difficulties
(a civil suit I assumed) which involved Intel.
I'd known many people with matters before the
courts, some close personal friends,
and few liked to discuss them.
Therefore it was not until
Randal had fielded my Perl questions, the talk
turned to minor chit chat and Randal unexpectedly proved
willing to discuss the matter that

I discovered the person I was drinking beer with
was looking at fifteen years in a few days, and, if convicted,
would have the biggest legitimate reputation by far of
any computer criminal.

I didn't necessarily credit the story he told me -- every
accused felon tells you it was all a misunderstanding, and
they are almost always just plain guilty.
Neither, I must confess, do I have unquestioning faith in
all the conclusions D.A.'s draw.

Days later, an Oregon Jury convicted Randal of
three felonies.
Randal Schwartz was, in the eyes of the law, a
Geek Kahuna Gone Bad,
the first.

Especially eerie about the Schwartz matter
was the silence surrounding it.

This clearly was a very significant case, far more so than
some which have drawn a lot of attention.
Randal Schwartz was either
the most dangerous computer criminal ever,
or something was terribly amiss, I had to know which.
That night I put the project I had discussed with Randal
on a shelf, where it remains.

"Feel free to stop dancing around the issue
any time you like and
tell me what this is all about."

On July 25, 1995, a Washington County jury in Hillsboro, Oregon
convicted Randal Schwartz of three felony counts:

Count 1: Randal did
between November 1, 1992 and November 1, 1993,
"unlawfully, knowingly and without authorization alter a computer and
computer network consisting of Intel computers Mink and Brillig".

Count 2:
Randal did between August 1, 1993 and November 1, 1993,
"unlawfully, and knowingly access and use a computer
and computer network for the purpose of committing theft of the Intel SSD's
password file".

Count 3: Randal did,
between October 21, 1993 and October 25, 1993,
"unlawfully, knowingly
access and use a computer and computer system for the purpose of committing
theft of the Intel SSD individual user's passwords."

"Look, son, Randal may be a what you call a Geek Kahuna,
but the law is the same for him as everyone else."

Actually, Randal was not tried under the usual criminal
laws, but Oregon's Computer Crime law.
Uses of this law are rare.
I can discover only two convictions under it since 1991,
and in one there was no trial.
The purpose for a separate Computer Crime Law
was to avoid having bad guys escape on technicalities,
something its drafters felt that
even an extensive revision of traditional criminal law would allow.
This they accomplished by making it a felony
to knowingly do anything
"unauthorized" on a computer.
Unusually for a law with severe penalties,
there is no requirement to show the defendant caused or intended
any harm.
All that is necessary is to show
that the proper authority did
not like whatever was done.

The first count is that, pure and simple --
Randal putting a
program on an Intel computer which Intel did not like.
The "stolen" property of the second and third counts
was never removed from Intel's premises, Intel was never
deprived of any of the economic benefit of the
property, and no evidence was presented
Randal intended to do either of these things.
These "thefts" consist entirely, again, of doing things
which Intel decided afterwards
it did not like and which it claims that Randal
was not allowed to do -- this time with
password files involved.

Criminal laws with wide applicability and severe
penalties are a feature of totalitarian states, and
may be a necessary evil in free ones.
In Randal's case, where he was trying to be helpful
and caused no harm,
the potential evil in applying such a law
is far more apparent than its necessity.

At the least,
a free society asks that a serious crime
genuinely reflect one of its serious concerns,
and not simply be a tool the powerful can use
against the powerless whom they find obnoxious.

A good test of this can be made when a powerful
individual breaks the law.
But for computer crime, which is complex and
technical, such tests are
available only as a matter of luck, since
the powerful decide who gets investigated.

However, we have such a stroke of luck in this case.
An Intel VP confessed on the stand to a more serious
infraction of Oregon's computer crime law.
And the Washington County D.A.'s office,
which so eagerly talked tough when facing the
powerless Randal,
has observed a demure silence on this topic.

The defects in the law should easily have
been enough to prevent
this case ever coming to trial, and made discussion of the rest
of this matter moot.
But at each step of the way, as one person or another faced
the prospect of telling Intel "no", they chose instead to
praise the Emperor's fine new suit.

Some Highlights from the Ongoing Farce

• 
  No evidence that Intel disapproved of Randal's behavior
  exists, except as remembered after the decision
  was made to prosecute him.
  Not so much as a hand-written note indicates anyone had a
  problem with Randal beforehand.
  
• 
  Lest those testifying for the prosecution,
  all of whom had financial interests in the good will of Intel,
  forget Intel's concern in this matter,
  an Intel Security person sitting at table next to the prosecutor
  served as a convenient reminder.
  
• 
  Intel was heavy-handed in making its presence felt throughout.
  The police prepared the search warrant at Intel premises,
  three Intel employees helped search Randal's house,
  and one helped police interrogate Randal.
  
• 
  This interrogation produced the prosecution's "best" evidence:
  police statements that put the words of a full confession
  in Randal's mouth.
  Indeed they claim Randal confessed to a history of hacking
  everyone he had done business with.
  (All these other "victims" provided witnesses for the defense,
  and Randal was charged with none of this activity.)
  
• 
  The police claim to have memorized Randal's highly technical
  statements with the aid of a few "cryptic" notes,
  and reproduced them accurately later at the station.
  It is hard to overstate what an incredible
  feat of memory this is.
  Det. Lilley, who produced the more complete statement,
  didn't know what the word "directory" means in computer lingo.
  Mere mortals with similar backgrounds would have found it
  impossible to follow the discussion,
  much less memorize it verbatim.
  
• 
  In other contexts, Intel had previously
  authorized Randal to commit both the acts
  allegedly unauthorized in this instance:
  cracking passwords and building a gateway to the Internet.
  
• 
  Randal was well aware of the steps a computer criminal usually takes
  to avoid detection of his activities and took none of them.
  

As I go through the records in this matter, more and more
startling and troubling material continues to come out.
It is as if this case was an entry in a contest to see
how much misbehavior could be squeezed into a case where nobody
was shot or beaten.
I document my progress into this shambles in the
Letters from Cybersalem.




The Letters From Cybersalem

CS0: Announcement.
Obviously, the letter which announced the series.

CS1: Disclosures and Disclaimers.
My connections
to Intel and Randal, and various other things which need to
be said. Nothing stunning IMHO, but you have a right to know and
to judge that for yourself.

CS2: Wizard Prosecutions: Then and Now.
A comparison of the quality of
the prosecution in the Salem, Massachusetts of 1692 and
the Hillsboro, Oregon of 1995.
Witchcraft prosecutions have declined sadly in the last
300 years.

CS3: The Unindicted: Ed Masi.
It is so easy to make a case for the crime of which
Randal was convicted,
an Intel VP testifying against Randal made a
full confession under oath on the stand.
It's all here.

CS4: Shocked, Shocked.
Randal's "crime" caused no harm, which is perplexing
since harm is basic to both the legal theory and lay
intuition of what "crime" means.
The policy infraction to which Ed Masi confessed
is shown to have quite likely caused real and serious harm to Intel.

CS5: Leadfinger.
This imbecility is not without its literary appeal.
A nicely Kafkaesque touch is added by the reluctance of the
Intel nabob who ordered Randal nailed to identify himself.
Of course, nobody forced him to come forward.

CS6: Unlearn Perl in 41 days!
Rich Cower of Intel security, adds to the list of
remarkable intellectual feats performed on behalf of the
prosecution. On June 13, 1995, he answers most questions about
Randal's Perl scripts with assurance, but passes on others
until he can look at the code.
41 days later he testifies under oath he does not know Perl.

CS7: The Essential Cower.
As Network Security Expert at Intel,
Cower played quite a role in the case.
He was present at the search,
participated in Randal's interrogation,
was an expert witness and
as State's Expert sat next to the prosecutor
for the whole trial.

CS8: What Does Familiar Mean?
However, this Intel "expert", when shown the seminal
work in modern network security, Cheswick and Bellovin,
does not recognize the cover.

CS9: Shortcut to Expertise.
An examination of Cower's background and qualifications,
as revealed in his testimony.

CS10: Too Stupid for Their Own Good?
Randal's local paper was
The Oregonian,
already notorious for ignoring the Packwood scandal.
It heaped abuse on Randal and the whole
"computer programming subculture"
during the trial.
I recommend anyone planning to work as a programmer
in Oregon read this one.

CS11: Oregon Employees have No First Amendment Rights
Unbelievable?
That is Judge Nachtigal's ruling.
Read it.

CS12:
Oops! There Goes Another Personal Right
Judge Nachtigal also discovered that the law
allowed "silly" (her word) prosecutions,
which in the D.A.'s words
show his "office must have an awful lot of time on their hands".
These are forbidden by the due process protections of the
14th Amendment,
but Nachtigal finds that
"we may want that authority there with computers",
and the charges against Randal stand.

CS13: The Confidence of the Public
This one is entirely uncommented quotes.
Here are some snippets.
The prosecutor: "I don't represent Intel."
The judge: "Not yet."
The detective: "We could probably use two or three more people".
The Associated Press:
"Intel Corp. is handing the local police $100,000 to have two
detectives concentrate their computer theft efforts
at the company."

CS14: Moore's Lawlessness
It would be surprising if Intel's heavy-handed contempt for the law
were unique to this case.
As Tim Jackson's new book shows, it is not.

An Open Letter to Intel

We wish to express our strong objection to the prosecution of
Randal Schwartz and Intel's role in it. We believe it necessary
that Intel repudiate the criminal charges made against Randal in
Oregon v. Schwartz, refund any "restitution" paid based on those
charges and offset the costs of Randal's defense against them.
This is the minimum that fairness requires since what happened
was at worst a policy breach and since Randal also suffered loss
of income, loss of reputation and a good deal of anguish.

The full list of signers

The current signature count, with subtotals by country

Signers whose names you might recognize

Comments made by the Signers

The Open Letter closed to new signatures on October 4,
1999. Thanks to all the over 2000 signers!

To get an auto-reply giving Randal's own statement, and
discussing how you can contribute to his Legal Defense Fund, send
an empty message to

Randal's Defense Fund mail daemon
.

Steve Pacenka maintains

the Friends of Randal Schwartz website
,
which is dedicated to archiving all relevant materials from
all sides of this issue.

There is also
Randal's award-winning website
.
How come he gets an award and I don't? :-)

You can subscribe to

the fors-discuss mailing list,
by sending a empty message to
join-fors-discuss@telelists.com.

There is also
fors-announce,
a moderated announcement list for Randal's case.
This can be subscribed to by
sending a empty message to join-fors-announce@telelists.com.

Press Coverage

I want to thank this site's host ISP
A2I (rahul.net).
for its steadfastness and generosity.

Uncle Sam wants you to help fight the war on terrorism. They demonize you and criminalize you and then ask for your help. What's a hacker to do?

Japanese Americans were poorly treated during WWII. They could have complained, and whined, but they volunteered for the military. A famous Army unit was most made up of Japanese Americans. They fought well and heroically on the European front. Their sacrifice and committment helped change American opinion of Japanese Americans.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Tuskeegee Airmen, The Navajo Code Talkers, and the Japanese "Nisei" who fought in Europe.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Tuskeegee Airmen, The Navajo Code Talkers, and the Japanese "Nisei" who fought in Europe.

We were quite successful in getting some decent curriculum with this technology hand-me-downs and for a couple of years ran the district's web server, until the ESD decided to take it over since it was too valuable of a resource to leave in the hands of deliquents learning new technologies.