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MIT's stuff is really cool by virtue of its name. MIT is respected, well known, etc. All the course materials are also a great store of knowledge. But...
I've been working on a community educational system called Oomind. The great thing about oomind is that people are not just passive recipients of knowledge. You can also contribute your knowledge, and evaluate the quality of others' contributions. And, you can answer quiz questions to develop an academic record which is cumulative rather than percentage based.
You can find more about the philosophy of Oomind, and an introduction to how Oomind works. The basic idea is that educational material is in the form of courselets. These courselets have scores in ten different attributes including practicality, creativity, and beauty. The scores are based on a weighted average of user's evaluations of the courselet. These scores help in two ways: searching for information, and determining dynamically the academic value of the knowledge. Each courselet can have quiz questions submitted by any user. The questions also have a weight based on users' evaluations. When you answer a question correctly, the weight is used to add a percentage of the courselet's attribute scores to your academic record as a learner.
Anyway, it is very dynamic, but it is still new so there isn't too much content. Please join up and submit courselets!!!
I've built something similar to this called Oomind (www.oomind.com). It uses a very sophisticated evaluation system which takes into account 10 different academic and educational attributes such as practicality, creativity and even beauty. It is still in the very early stages of development, but it is actually up and running with about 100 articles on it. Sign up and contribute!
It exists: www.oomind.com. It is much more sophisticated in its review system than slashdot is: multiple dimensions of review such as practicality, creativity and even beauty.
Why not help build one from scratch: www.oomind.com. Check it out. It is very new and immature, but I've built it with the potential for exactly the kind of thing you are thinking about.
The internet/www is one of those really nifty technologies that changes the whole way of doing many things. Because the internet allows for incredible amounts of interactivity (not taken advantage of by most sites), peer review suddenly becomes much more "real". Traditional journals have a small number of peers who serve to review any given article, and constant discussion is not generally published.
The internet of course can completely change that where any peer can review any work. And why stop at scientific publishing? And why stop at publishing for that matter. Much published work serves an educational purpose as well as a documentary purpose.
So, here is a plug for my online educational community, Oomind. It allows anyone to publish, and to review, and to have that review reflected in an educational context. Basically, you can write a "courselet", and post it on Oomind. The courselet is initially given an evaluation by yourself, the author based on 10 attributes including practicality, information content, beauty and creativity among others. Once the courselet is on the system, others can also review it and the attributes have scores based on a weighted average of all the evaluations. The educational part comes in when you or others add quiz questions to your courselet. These questions are also weighted based on peer evaluations, and those weights determine how much credit one gets for the courselet when the question is answered correctly. Your educational credit is cumulative rather than percentage based. There are many other features to the system as well which create a democratic and more importantly meritocratic system.
Yes - morals should not be legislated. But what about codifying them? Murder is a good example that you have brought up.
Anyway, I do believe that there is a natural "law" where our actions (moral, immoral, amoral) have personal and societal consequences, and that with some (possibly significant) forethought, we can make fairly informed decisions about what those consequences might be. Then the only issue is much more basic: what do we belive is more important, personal gain, societal gain, or somewhere in between? Are we individuals or are we part of a organism of humanity?
If as a society we can agree about where we fall in that more fundamental spectrum, then perhaps we can codify a significant number of moral decisions.
:-)
Note that I didn't mention anything about sexual activity inside the relationship. I suppose that there are many interesting issues there as well, but I think the most important is that one needs to be loving, respectful and fun with one's partner. Missionary position? Heck, I'm not sure I even know what that is! But, don't get me wrong, I haven't really thought nearly as much about sexual behavior inside of marriage as I have about sexuality in a societal context.
But that's not really too applicable to the whole online porn issue.
Cheers.
I have a fairly unpopular opinion:
Pornography, wether child, teen, obese, hetero, homo, s+m, bondage, etc. is all of the same type, and only varies by degree.
To me, there is a "right" way to behave sexually: one and only one lifetime consensual sexual partner with the sexual relationship established after formal partnership (marriage), with the primary intent of procreation. !!!
Any sexual activity outside of that partnership (including auto-sexuality) is inappropriate to some degree or another, but is all of the same type and ultimate consequence. I will be the first to admit that a teen masturbating in the bathroom is a lot different than an individual who gets off on a harem of children. But again, in degree. There is no hard and fast boundary between the two behaviors.
Anyone who has read this far with either be thinking I'm a complete idiot or a religious fundamentalist. I hope I am neither. I just happen to have thought about this issue a lot over the last 18 years (since my early teens). So if you are still reading, here is why I think the way I do in very brief form:
Essentially every major world religion and culture advocates or prescribes chastity: no sexual partners until marriage, and only one after that with the intent to produce children. Why is this such a common view? Perhaps because it "works". Next idea. What is the conceptual dividing line between the following spectrum of sexual activity: masturbation, being masturbated with your consent, giving someone a hand job with their consent, oral sex, oral sex with someone slightly younger than yourself, oral sex with someone lots younger than yourself (still consensual, still age of "majority"), and lastly oral sex with a minor who has given consent (and of course that last one is the real controversial step). What age exactly is it when someone can give consent? Is it 15? Is it 14? Is it puberty? Is it 10? There is no scientific means known at this time to decide that age, only a legalistic mechanism that says such an age is too young. Next idea. At what point is safe sex really safe? At what point is birth control really effective? Again, there is a whole spectrum of options here and they all have one thing in common: nothing is 100% certain to be safe or effective.
I could go on with a number of other spectrums of options or behavior where the only real differences between the options are of degree rather than type. The only time there is a difference of type comes when you choose to be proactive about chastity, formal monogamy and procreation.
I don't think that my argument is going to change anyone's opinion about the whole issue of sexuality, but perhaps it can shed some light on the issue of the article: legalistic solutions are not really solutions!!! (Which is something I think many here _will_ agree with.) I believe from the preceding points and others, that the only solution is actually a sort of moral conversion of our society, where people recognize the logical and societal consequences of their actions and change their moral standpoint on that basis. Good luck!
with university education / technical college training etc. is that it is single purpose (for the most part). University education is about theory, not practical application whereas technical college is about practical application only. Even the "well-rounded" education of a liberal arts degree is still almost completely focussed on the theoretical side of things.
But in reality, there are many aspects to learning which we absorb throughout our lives, but are often unacknowledged. For example, every single human being learns about beauty. Very rarely is beauty approached directly in educational systems, or in job "requirements", or in civic responsibilities. Another example is creativity.
There is an educational system which does account for these things explicitly: the Oomind educational system (www.oomind.com). It accounts for educational material having the following attributes:
This kinda stuff isn't nice for unix servers either. I have both FreeBSD with Apache and Linux with Tomcat doing stuff and every time a worm like this comes along, my stuff drags to a halt and occaisionally crashes (if my app server is set up in a fragile way).
At least I won't be perpetuating this one though.
I have used Java and Objective-C professionally in a very extensive manner, and a little bit of C++. I think they are all great, but I feel more friendly to Objective-C:-) It is great to see that the IVM people have bothered with it.
It would be really fantastic if they made it so that you could inline any language inside any other. The big difficulty with this is that the three languages (C++, Java, Objective-C) have fundamentally different ways of "implementing" objects, particularly method calls, but other aspects as well. Objective-C provides more flexible run-time typing and meta-class objects. Java has decent security, exception and threading built in (decent, not great). C++ has operater overloading, friends, etc.
Check out my Courselet:
Architectures with XML Documents
Okay - this is a "religious" issue. Building and promoting for C++ works up to a point. But the fact is that C++ and Java are both industrial strength languages (especially if you consider their libraries and tool support). It seems that the IVM does C++ "natively" but requires an extra step for Java etc. Why? Can't it just figure it out from the context? The file extension? The syntax?
This IVM seems to be a pretty cool idea. Not new, but cool (IBM's UVM). I like the fact that they bothered with Objective-C (although that might just be because I believe the GNU GCC supports it).
What would you suggest for an email client? This is really a legacy application problem. 82000 messages (not 8200) might be easy to transfer over if it was just a matter of the headers and content. But unfortunately it is also a matter of the folders and filters. I have tried importing into Outlook (both versions), but the process has been incredibly painful and I have been very happy that I backed up my email before I started the attempts. I'm not comfortable looking at a text-based client. Nor am I (currently) in a position to pay lots of money for an enterprise-quality solution.
Please, if you know of a good email client that meets these requirements, let me know!
Thanks.
I've been using Netscape Communicator 4.72 for the last X years. Why? I have over 82000 email messages that I have kept! I do not want the hassle of moving over to Outlook or some other platform for email - lots of filters to set up, _lots_ of folders to set up, and many many thousands of messages to transfer. So I've been waiting for Mozilla to mature. I have tried it a few times over the last two years - and always it has not quite made the cut. In particular, importing the huge number of messages and folders has been a real hassle (often crashing). I'm getting close to switching. This release seems much better. We'll see...
just tell your boss that the organization should consider decentralizing - lowers the risk of catastrophic terrorist act taking out the business.
I know that comment might be considered to be in bad taste, but seriously - if America decentralized, there would be nowhere for terrorists to hit.
During the glory days of the.com boom, I was working for a company in the bay area - telecommuting 100% of the time. I was responsible for the development of the company's first product to launch. I did extensive market analysis, requirments analysis, architecture, design, development, testing etc. all from my home in small-town Ontario in Canada.
Tools? CVS and email and telephone. Daily status reports.
But. After a couple of months, one of the founders got it in his head that I was evil incarnate and lazy and incapable to boot. The next year was hell for me. I had to work 80 hour weeks to keep up the tiny fraction of political good-will left to me. And because I was out of sight (site), he had all the opportunities in the world to slander me, but noone thought to check with me to see my side of the story. I would hear about accusations weeks after they had been made and been allowed to fester.
Suffice it to say: there are some personal risks involved with telecommuting.
The good side? Lots of flexibility to get up for a few moments and hang out with my family, doing errands was usually okay in the middle of the day.
Good luck - and keep in mind the political side of telecommuting if you do convince your bosses!
Architectures with XML Documents
"The well-being of mankind, its peace and security are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established." - Baha'u'llah
"The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective." - Baha'u'llah
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." - Baha'u'llah
Official Baha'i Web Site
Does the no violence policy include abstracted violence? The Civilization series of games is great if the abstracted violence is okay.
For pure non-violence, Railroad Tycoon II is great. I've played it quite a bit - the main downside is that it takes quite a while to get up to speed and it also takes quite a while to play a single game. Its main benefits for an educational setting include: history, geography, macro economics, and finance. It can also be multi-player over a network.
Perhaps I was not clear enough. I do not believe that libertarians support laws such as this, quite the contrary, I know they do not. But the reason this kind of law is conceived is because the govt does not have enough power to respond to the citizens rather than be manipulated by corporations. If you take away power from government, it doesn't automatically go back to the citizens like libertarians would like to believe. Rather, it would now fall strait into the laps of the corporations.
what's happening? The US government is obviously being terribly corrupted by various organizations with lots of money. The fact that this bill is even being contemplated says a lot about what corporations will do.
Libertarians seem to think that by reducing gov't influence in daily life that things will somehow work out for the better. Hmm. Stupid! Sorry, but the fact is that corporations would have even more control and we would live in a capitalist dictatorship! Right now, the balance is sliding ever so slowly towards more power for corporations. It is only slow because they are somewhat restricted in their methods by regulations of the gov't. And the gov't is the only organization which has the power to respond appropriately to pressure from the citizens. Boycotts only work with massive support, and I don't think American consumers have the balls to do that anymore. On the other hand, only relatively large numbers of citizens are required to raise enough stink to get legislation trashed.
Good luck USA - you are gonna need it. I'm scared living in Canada just because of proximity.
It might be worthwhile for people from other contries to try and get diplomatic pressure put onto the US to get rid of this while it is gestating. I don't think an abortion of this travesty would be out of line!
Also, I wonder what that will do for free trade: computers could be made in Canada or Mexico and shipped into the US.
Personally, I'm glad I don't live in the US. You have a facist government!
You are right: I did and probably still do have lots of prejudices about many other computer languages including lisp. My experience with lisp is deeper than my experience with say Perl, so I thought I could offer at least a small comment. As well, I did phrase most of my comment as questions - does lisp have bindings to XXXXXX?
There were two or three years when Java was really struggling to find itself: applets, gui apps, etc. That time was when I was transitioning from Objective-C to Java, mostly due to market demands and job opportunities. I'm very lucky that my enterprise development background in Objective-C is the same space that Java eventually moved into.
The Java community is big and hard to get into. If I was younger and with fewer responsibilities, I would definitely be involved in something more radical and more interesting... and when I was younger, I was involved in such a thing.
I have a strong interest in AI, particularly the work of Douglas Hofstadter and his compatriots. I love the CopyCat stuff done by Melanie Mitchell. Since I have this interest, I wish that I could spend more time with lisp.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think I said anywhere that Java was a good language. In fact you are right - there are many things that suck about it. I loved Objective-C and wished for 6 years that NextStep/OpenStep/WebObjects would catch on so that I could be one of the good-old-boys from the early days. Objective-C was a great language compared to Java. Mind you, Smalltalk and Eiffel are even better, and I know it.
Slashdot Mirror
MIT's stuff is really cool by virtue of its name. MIT is respected, well known, etc. All the course materials are also a great store of knowledge. But...
I've been working on a community educational system called Oomind. The great thing about oomind is that people are not just passive recipients of knowledge. You can also contribute your knowledge, and evaluate the quality of others' contributions. And, you can answer quiz questions to develop an academic record which is cumulative rather than percentage based.
You can find more about the philosophy of Oomind, and an introduction to how Oomind works. The basic idea is that educational material is in the form of courselets. These courselets have scores in ten different attributes including practicality, creativity, and beauty. The scores are based on a weighted average of user's evaluations of the courselet. These scores help in two ways: searching for information, and determining dynamically the academic value of the knowledge. Each courselet can have quiz questions submitted by any user. The questions also have a weight based on users' evaluations. When you answer a question correctly, the weight is used to add a percentage of the courselet's attribute scores to your academic record as a learner.
Anyway, it is very dynamic, but it is still new so there isn't too much content. Please join up and submit courselets!!!
I've built something similar to this called Oomind (www.oomind.com). It uses a very sophisticated evaluation system which takes into account 10 different academic and educational attributes such as practicality, creativity and even beauty. It is still in the very early stages of development, but it is actually up and running with about 100 articles on it. Sign up and contribute!
It exists: www.oomind.com. It is much more sophisticated in its review system than slashdot is: multiple dimensions of review such as practicality, creativity and even beauty.
Why not help build one from scratch: www.oomind.com. Check it out. It is very new and immature, but I've built it with the potential for exactly the kind of thing you are thinking about.
The internet/www is one of those really nifty technologies that changes the whole way of doing many things. Because the internet allows for incredible amounts of interactivity (not taken advantage of by most sites), peer review suddenly becomes much more "real". Traditional journals have a small number of peers who serve to review any given article, and constant discussion is not generally published.
The internet of course can completely change that where any peer can review any work. And why stop at scientific publishing? And why stop at publishing for that matter. Much published work serves an educational purpose as well as a documentary purpose.
So, here is a plug for my online educational community, Oomind. It allows anyone to publish, and to review, and to have that review reflected in an educational context. Basically, you can write a "courselet", and post it on Oomind. The courselet is initially given an evaluation by yourself, the author based on 10 attributes including practicality, information content, beauty and creativity among others. Once the courselet is on the system, others can also review it and the attributes have scores based on a weighted average of all the evaluations. The educational part comes in when you or others add quiz questions to your courselet. These questions are also weighted based on peer evaluations, and those weights determine how much credit one gets for the courselet when the question is answered correctly. Your educational credit is cumulative rather than percentage based. There are many other features to the system as well which create a democratic and more importantly meritocratic system.
If you are interested, you can check out: the main oomind site, the philosophy of oomind, and a general introduction to oomind.
Yes - morals should not be legislated. But what about codifying them? Murder is a good example that you have brought up. Anyway, I do believe that there is a natural "law" where our actions (moral, immoral, amoral) have personal and societal consequences, and that with some (possibly significant) forethought, we can make fairly informed decisions about what those consequences might be. Then the only issue is much more basic: what do we belive is more important, personal gain, societal gain, or somewhere in between? Are we individuals or are we part of a organism of humanity? If as a society we can agree about where we fall in that more fundamental spectrum, then perhaps we can codify a significant number of moral decisions.
:-) Note that I didn't mention anything about sexual activity inside the relationship. I suppose that there are many interesting issues there as well, but I think the most important is that one needs to be loving, respectful and fun with one's partner. Missionary position? Heck, I'm not sure I even know what that is! But, don't get me wrong, I haven't really thought nearly as much about sexual behavior inside of marriage as I have about sexuality in a societal context. But that's not really too applicable to the whole online porn issue. Cheers.
I have a fairly unpopular opinion:
Pornography, wether child, teen, obese, hetero, homo, s+m, bondage, etc. is all of the same type, and only varies by degree. To me, there is a "right" way to behave sexually: one and only one lifetime consensual sexual partner with the sexual relationship established after formal partnership (marriage), with the primary intent of procreation. !!! Any sexual activity outside of that partnership (including auto-sexuality) is inappropriate to some degree or another, but is all of the same type and ultimate consequence. I will be the first to admit that a teen masturbating in the bathroom is a lot different than an individual who gets off on a harem of children. But again, in degree. There is no hard and fast boundary between the two behaviors. Anyone who has read this far with either be thinking I'm a complete idiot or a religious fundamentalist. I hope I am neither. I just happen to have thought about this issue a lot over the last 18 years (since my early teens). So if you are still reading, here is why I think the way I do in very brief form: Essentially every major world religion and culture advocates or prescribes chastity: no sexual partners until marriage, and only one after that with the intent to produce children. Why is this such a common view? Perhaps because it "works". Next idea. What is the conceptual dividing line between the following spectrum of sexual activity: masturbation, being masturbated with your consent, giving someone a hand job with their consent, oral sex, oral sex with someone slightly younger than yourself, oral sex with someone lots younger than yourself (still consensual, still age of "majority"), and lastly oral sex with a minor who has given consent (and of course that last one is the real controversial step). What age exactly is it when someone can give consent? Is it 15? Is it 14? Is it puberty? Is it 10? There is no scientific means known at this time to decide that age, only a legalistic mechanism that says such an age is too young. Next idea. At what point is safe sex really safe? At what point is birth control really effective? Again, there is a whole spectrum of options here and they all have one thing in common: nothing is 100% certain to be safe or effective. I could go on with a number of other spectrums of options or behavior where the only real differences between the options are of degree rather than type. The only time there is a difference of type comes when you choose to be proactive about chastity, formal monogamy and procreation. I don't think that my argument is going to change anyone's opinion about the whole issue of sexuality, but perhaps it can shed some light on the issue of the article: legalistic solutions are not really solutions!!! (Which is something I think many here _will_ agree with.) I believe from the preceding points and others, that the only solution is actually a sort of moral conversion of our society, where people recognize the logical and societal consequences of their actions and change their moral standpoint on that basis. Good luck!
You can also check out the philosophy behind Oomind and a general introduction to Oomind.
This kinda stuff isn't nice for unix servers either. I have both FreeBSD with Apache and Linux with Tomcat doing stuff and every time a worm like this comes along, my stuff drags to a halt and occaisionally crashes (if my app server is set up in a fragile way). At least I won't be perpetuating this one though.
I have written Reflections on The Terrorist Attacks on New York and Washington.
I have used Java and Objective-C professionally in a very extensive manner, and a little bit of C++. I think they are all great, but I feel more friendly to Objective-C :-) It is great to see that the IVM people have bothered with it.
It would be really fantastic if they made it so that you could inline any language inside any other. The big difficulty with this is that the three languages (C++, Java, Objective-C) have fundamentally different ways of "implementing" objects, particularly method calls, but other aspects as well. Objective-C provides more flexible run-time typing and meta-class objects. Java has decent security, exception and threading built in (decent, not great). C++ has operater overloading, friends, etc.
Check out my Courselet: Architectures with XML Documents
Okay - this is a "religious" issue. Building and promoting for C++ works up to a point. But the fact is that C++ and Java are both industrial strength languages (especially if you consider their libraries and tool support). It seems that the IVM does C++ "natively" but requires an extra step for Java etc. Why? Can't it just figure it out from the context? The file extension? The syntax? This IVM seems to be a pretty cool idea. Not new, but cool (IBM's UVM). I like the fact that they bothered with Objective-C (although that might just be because I believe the GNU GCC supports it).
What would you suggest for an email client? This is really a legacy application problem. 82000 messages (not 8200) might be easy to transfer over if it was just a matter of the headers and content. But unfortunately it is also a matter of the folders and filters. I have tried importing into Outlook (both versions), but the process has been incredibly painful and I have been very happy that I backed up my email before I started the attempts. I'm not comfortable looking at a text-based client. Nor am I (currently) in a position to pay lots of money for an enterprise-quality solution. Please, if you know of a good email client that meets these requirements, let me know! Thanks.
I've been using Netscape Communicator 4.72 for the last X years. Why? I have over 82000 email messages that I have kept! I do not want the hassle of moving over to Outlook or some other platform for email - lots of filters to set up, _lots_ of folders to set up, and many many thousands of messages to transfer. So I've been waiting for Mozilla to mature. I have tried it a few times over the last two years - and always it has not quite made the cut. In particular, importing the huge number of messages and folders has been a real hassle (often crashing). I'm getting close to switching. This release seems much better. We'll see...
"Blade Runner" the Comic Noir, "Akira" the Film
just tell your boss that the organization should consider decentralizing - lowers the risk of catastrophic terrorist act taking out the business. I know that comment might be considered to be in bad taste, but seriously - if America decentralized, there would be nowhere for terrorists to hit.
During the glory days of the .com boom, I was working for a company in the bay area - telecommuting 100% of the time. I was responsible for the development of the company's first product to launch. I did extensive market analysis, requirments analysis, architecture, design, development, testing etc. all from my home in small-town Ontario in Canada.
Tools? CVS and email and telephone. Daily status reports.
But. After a couple of months, one of the founders got it in his head that I was evil incarnate and lazy and incapable to boot. The next year was hell for me. I had to work 80 hour weeks to keep up the tiny fraction of political good-will left to me. And because I was out of sight (site), he had all the opportunities in the world to slander me, but noone thought to check with me to see my side of the story. I would hear about accusations weeks after they had been made and been allowed to fester.
Suffice it to say: there are some personal risks involved with telecommuting.
The good side? Lots of flexibility to get up for a few moments and hang out with my family, doing errands was usually okay in the middle of the day.
Good luck - and keep in mind the political side of telecommuting if you do convince your bosses!
Architectures with XML Documents
"The well-being of mankind, its peace and security are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established." - Baha'u'llah "The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective." - Baha'u'llah "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." - Baha'u'llah Official Baha'i Web Site
Does the no violence policy include abstracted violence? The Civilization series of games is great if the abstracted violence is okay. For pure non-violence, Railroad Tycoon II is great. I've played it quite a bit - the main downside is that it takes quite a while to get up to speed and it also takes quite a while to play a single game. Its main benefits for an educational setting include: history, geography, macro economics, and finance. It can also be multi-player over a network.
Perhaps I was not clear enough. I do not believe that libertarians support laws such as this, quite the contrary, I know they do not. But the reason this kind of law is conceived is because the govt does not have enough power to respond to the citizens rather than be manipulated by corporations. If you take away power from government, it doesn't automatically go back to the citizens like libertarians would like to believe. Rather, it would now fall strait into the laps of the corporations.
what's happening? The US government is obviously being terribly corrupted by various organizations with lots of money. The fact that this bill is even being contemplated says a lot about what corporations will do. Libertarians seem to think that by reducing gov't influence in daily life that things will somehow work out for the better. Hmm. Stupid! Sorry, but the fact is that corporations would have even more control and we would live in a capitalist dictatorship! Right now, the balance is sliding ever so slowly towards more power for corporations. It is only slow because they are somewhat restricted in their methods by regulations of the gov't. And the gov't is the only organization which has the power to respond appropriately to pressure from the citizens. Boycotts only work with massive support, and I don't think American consumers have the balls to do that anymore. On the other hand, only relatively large numbers of citizens are required to raise enough stink to get legislation trashed. Good luck USA - you are gonna need it. I'm scared living in Canada just because of proximity.
It might be worthwhile for people from other contries to try and get diplomatic pressure put onto the US to get rid of this while it is gestating. I don't think an abortion of this travesty would be out of line! Also, I wonder what that will do for free trade: computers could be made in Canada or Mexico and shipped into the US. Personally, I'm glad I don't live in the US. You have a facist government!
Time to build on this. Judges are special, but not that special! This sort of thing needs to be leveraged!
You are right: I did and probably still do have lots of prejudices about many other computer languages including lisp. My experience with lisp is deeper than my experience with say Perl, so I thought I could offer at least a small comment. As well, I did phrase most of my comment as questions - does lisp have bindings to XXXXXX? There were two or three years when Java was really struggling to find itself: applets, gui apps, etc. That time was when I was transitioning from Objective-C to Java, mostly due to market demands and job opportunities. I'm very lucky that my enterprise development background in Objective-C is the same space that Java eventually moved into. The Java community is big and hard to get into. If I was younger and with fewer responsibilities, I would definitely be involved in something more radical and more interesting... and when I was younger, I was involved in such a thing. I have a strong interest in AI, particularly the work of Douglas Hofstadter and his compatriots. I love the CopyCat stuff done by Melanie Mitchell. Since I have this interest, I wish that I could spend more time with lisp.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think I said anywhere that Java was a good language. In fact you are right - there are many things that suck about it. I loved Objective-C and wished for 6 years that NextStep/OpenStep/WebObjects would catch on so that I could be one of the good-old-boys from the early days. Objective-C was a great language compared to Java. Mind you, Smalltalk and Eiffel are even better, and I know it.