Yes, Linus is worth of consideration, not only for his own achievements but also for what he symbolizes in the fight against Intellectual Monopoly. This is one of the great fights of our times... and the wealth-grab of widening intellectual monopoly is part of what makes the rich (nations) richer and the poor poorer. Nominating Linus for the Nobel Peace Price would draw needed attention to this fight.

Linux is an equalizer for the poor. I am involved in a project in Brazil where we take old (and usually broken) donated machines show local kids how to rebuild them and put linux on them. Dozens of kids who would not otherwise have been able to afford a computer or learn about technology have benefited from this. And there are thousands of such projects around the world, having made a huge difference at the grass-roots in many communities.

I heartily support Linus's nomination!

Microsoft might not want to "fend off" some legal attacks... by paying a settlement, which they can easily do, they give the trolls the means to attack others who might NOT be able to afford a settlement, thus clearing the battlefield, err, market, for Microsoft's products.

I have no idea if this applies here, but this isn't cynicism... Corporations DO think this way. There is no morality involved, only the logic of competition in the markets, and there are no questions of legality, only those of court and settlement costs vs potential profits.

The author of TFA suggests Python... and I would concur if I thought language was really the important thing. But it isn't... what matters much more is HOW you teach programming. Python *is* interesting in that you could re-write SICP ("The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", the Scheme-based MIT intro text) to use Python, or you could teach the "intro to data structures in Pascal" course I took my first year in college (1985) using Python. It's a nice, clean language that adapts well to almost any programming paradigm.

But the real question is, are you going to use the SICP approach or the more typical procedural programming and data structures approach to teach (maybe with some superficial OOP thrown in)? You can do the former in LISP, ML, Python, and many other dynamic languages. You can do the later using basically any major programming language; nowadays Universities tend to use either Java or C++, although the aforementioned dynamic languages could be used as well.

The former will presumably give you better programmers, but a much smaller percentage of entrants will survive the first year. So it's a quality vs. quantity thing, but the answer is by no means clear-cut... many of those who wouldn't make it through a first year of SICP could still become excellent programmers after a few years of a more procedural approach. And many of those who'd excel at an SICP course might get too bored with the tedium of most large scale programming to ever become software engineers, prefering instead to go into academic CS or other sciences.

The bottom line is, it isn't language that matters but how concrete or abstract the concepts that you're learning first are. Do higher levels of abstraction make for better software engineering? Probably, but in a real software project it doesn't help you that the design is beautiful if you can't find enough people who understand it to implement it. Let's be honest... what percentage of working programmers even really groks recursion, never mind anonymous first-order functions or metaobject protocols?

On the flip side there are those (like Paul Graham) that have argued that if you use higher level abstractions and a programming language that can express them, you only need 1/10th as many programmers. But I think only 1/100th of programmers today are capable of it, so that leaves us with a large deficit.

Rambling on, :j

I don't know about that. Man is exceptionally good at least at producing if not controlling destructive forces. According to Wikipedia ("Megaton"), the 1960 Chilean earthquake (the largest ever recorded) released energies equivalent to 60,000 Gigatons of TNT. That was a 9.5, but since 2 steps on the logarithmic Richter scale are equivalent to a factor of 1000 in energy released, that means a 7.5 quake is only about 60 Gigatons equivalent, which is rather less than the destructive power of the world's nuclear arsenal. Just the US alone has nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons (fas.org), a good portion of which are 30 Megaton equivalents.

So the nuclear weapons we already have are plenty to cause the forces released by a big earthquake, although not for the very biggest earthquakes. But the difference is only a factor of a few hundred, surely we could build a couple of million big bombs if really wanted to... ;-)

TFA doesn't define the term or tell us exactly HOW to convert biomass to electricity. Ok, obviously you can burn the biomass and use the heat to generate electricity the traditional way, i.e. via steam and turbines... but how is that "bioelectricity"..? To me that's just a wood-fired power plant.

According to Wikipedia bioelectricity refers to the various electric fields and currents generated in living tissue. If we could somehow harvest that directly (Matrix-style) then we could talk about "using bioelectricity", but TTBOMK no techniques for doing that in a way that generates useful currents and/or voltages has been discovered "in the real world".

I don't have access to the on-line edition of "Science" which is apparently the source for this article... do they really talk about bioelectricity or is this just a case of some brainless science journalist being too clever?

Although, as some commenters have pointed out, everything in the world can be explained in terms of quantum mechanics, until now pretty much everything that is relevant to life on earth didn't seem to need quantum mechanics (QM)... it would work just as well with a chemistry based on a classical physics.

Yeah, we have proven that underneath all that it's really something else by splitting the atom, but aside from the social implications of the atom bomb, nuclear power, and a few more obscure technologies based on the radioactive decay, most of QM seemed to be ever so far removed from the reality of life even today. So to most people, including most natural scientists, the counter-intuitive weirdness of much of QM seemed both unreal and irrelevant.

But there are a few unexplained little problems in the natural sciences, such as the efficiency of photosynthesis... and some rather larger puzzles such as the nature of consciousness. If it turns out that purely quantum physical effects, i.e. ones that cannot be explained by any classical physics underlie something as basic to life as photosynthesis, then suddenly QM becomes highly real and relevant and we'll have to consider it as an option in anything difficult that we try to explain in the natural sciences.

I.e., maybe Roger Penrose was right and no classical computer can ever duplicate the human mind even with arbitrarily large computing power. (Penrose first wrote about this before Quantum computers were even conceived of).

And, even stranger, maybe plants can actually create elements by transmutation... there are scientifically plausible explanations for how this could work, but they've been relegated to fringe science because they require QM-effects and those don't play a role in Biology, right?

In short, if it is true that photosynthesis requires QM-effects, then we'll need to be looking at all of nature through a different, if not entirely new lens. And we may find that much of what we thought we knew well suddenly looks very different.

If you have trouble losing weight because the ecology in your intestine, then you could try changing the composition of that ecology. The is certainly possible, different species of bacteria will thrive on different types of food, so you could start by changing the balance of carbs/protein/fat in your diet drastically and that will certainly have some effect on your endo-ecology. At the same time take lots of probiotics... yoghurt, kefir, live sauerkraut, kombucha, EM, stuff like that. The probiotics are full of living bacteria of certain types which have been shown to help your system defend itself against certain harmful bacteria and probably do that by changing the balance of power in your endoecology as well. Figs and prunes are also interesting as they are known to help the growth of some beneficial bacteria.

This is going to be a trial and error thing... which bacteria thrive in your intestines is a combination of your genetics, which species of bacteria you were exposed to throughout your life, anti-biotics you have taken, and what you eat. And although your internal ecology certainly changes in response to what you put into your body, nobody yet knows who to change it in a specific or desirable way. We only recently begun having the tools to even begin to study such things scientifically (as TFA says), and even with those tools it's a difficult and probably huge topic that we've only began to scratch at.

But go ahead and experiment... you have a better chance at finding something that works for you by trial-and-error than waiting for science to tell you, which isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. Just make some changes and give it about 6 weeks to observe and record how they affect you before making more changes. :j

I didn't *attack* the source, I merely pointed out who the source really was (NOT unl.edu). I also DID point to information that faults the argument, with references (the Wikipedia article on DDT which has lots of references). I didn't think it necessary or appropriate to copy bits of the Wikipedia article for lazy schmucks who don't want to read it themselves (or would rather not because it might shatter their cherished illusions).

Furthermore, while countering a reference with a reference, I also directly addressed the argument of the poster (rather than of his reference) that DDT was a "cure" for malaria. It isn't, for many reasons, of which I gave one: mosquitoes develop resistance to DDT.

But what I'd really like to know is, who are "you guys"..? What club did I just become a member of?

The article you linked to, "DDT, facts vs. fears", is a publication by the "American Council on Science and Health", which appears to be a typical corporate apologist front group. It has nothing whatsoever to do with UNL (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) despite being hosted at a poorly configured MacOS X server there.

If you want to know the real facts about DDT, the Wikipedia entry for it is excellent and rather more complete than the above article. The reality, as always, is more complex than iconoclasts on either side of any debate would have it. DDT is at best a part of any strategy against malaria... by itself it could only provide temporary relief (since mosquitoes become resistant to it) at high cost in human and environmental health.

Also DDT is NOT banned around the world. It was banned in the US, and with time many other countries either also banned it or simply discontinued its use, each for their own reasons. DDT is also cheap enough and easy enough to produce that all but the poorest of poor countries can make all they need themselves if they chose to use it.