The main purpose of AP Statistics (and AP Calculus) seems to be to teach limited subsets of the functionality of the TI-89 calculator series. The programmability features of that calculator are never taught in American schools.

Not that AP Computer Science is much better. Its main purpose seems to be to teach the Serious Programming Language du Jour, currently Java. Any algorithmic learning has to happen in between the struggles with that language.

I'm not pleased with the College Board's position in American society.

I refuse to build a Connected Home without Free Software. Imagine the security nightmares of SCADA and consumer electronics, together at last.

This has to apply to the drivers and the peripheral firmware, too, because the Linux kernel has its own vulnerabilities.

You totally misunderstand Stallman's point. Stallman is not arguing that open source leads to better quality software. That would be Eric Raymond. Stallman is arguing that you can't trust Microsoft. More of an Auguste Kirchhoffs interpretation. And I don't see what OSX has to do with free software.

Stallman objects to closed source philosophically, and Windows especially. In addition to being proprietary, Stallman is arguing that Windows has features to report your use of Microsoft software and potentially lock you out (Windows Activation), to add or delete software without warning (Windows Update), to track you across any device around the world (Microsoft Account), and to keep you from using the computer in inappropriate ways (Protected Media Path, Driver Signing, Secure Boot). I don't see how he's wrong.

Somebody in the Chinese government seems to have noticed, and is now trying to get Windows banned there.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

Yes, that was Jon's point, and it has been observed by economists as the Jevons paradox. As we get greater efficiency, we use more. An old TV was terribly inefficient, but you generally had only the one, and it wasn't running all day. Now, a typical house has a TV in every inhabited room.

The real fun will begin if electric cars and distributed renewable energy become popular. Then household electricity consumption trends could become extremely nonlinear for a while.

I don't think companies really "have enough resources" to rewrite OpenSSL. The problem is that you can't just throw money at a project and have stuff happen. You need people to implement those changes. And we're still in the clutches of the software crisis.

The problem with OpenSSL is that it is really, really bad code. It's security code, which few people have the expertise to handle. It has an idiosyncratic style, which few people want to look at, it's so painful. And it is so littered with backwards compatibility hacks and defective functions that very few people can know whether it's doing something right. Even the OpenSSL people don't know what it's doing, given all the comments about OpenSSL functions that they're not using properly.

So, best of luck to the CII, trying to "improve" OpenSSL without getting rid of all its weirdness. I think the OpenBSD people are right, and they should just tear down everything and rebuild it.

XMPP is almost as centralized as Twitter. You still communicate through a server that can be shut down. The only difference is that, if you lose access to one server, you can switch to another server, or start your own if you have enough money. (The other difference is that XMPP is not a broadcast medium.)

A proper uncensorable platform would be peer-to-peer. That's where IPv4's lack of true end-to-end connectivity has irritated me for years. There are attempts to work around this problem using, for example, BitTorrent's distributed hash table protocol or Bitcoin's blockchain or both or Onion routing. The problem is that there is no money in a truly peer-to-peer communications system, so development has always been slower than centralized systems.

What difference does that make in contemporary capitalism?

It seems that no matter which party we vote for, we get either corporate-funded stooges or patronizing paternalists, like Dianne Feinstein of California. The media are complicit in this miscarriage of justice with their anointed "serious" candidates and "wasted" votes, for various reasons probably including the high amounts of money that they receive during campaigns.

So, what do you think about Larry Lessig and his change of focus from free culture to Congressional corruption?

There's a major difference: In an aircraft, you're always minutes away from falling out of the sky in fiery doom. A car has the option of pulling over and stopping. Also, I've been watching Mayday, and all of the autopilot accidents have been a result of poor user interface design. If an autopilot has difficulty, then a human pilot will have difficulty. On the other hand, the Miracle on the Hudson was facilitated by good use of the autopilot, to make corrections that a human would not be able to handle, in total contrast to that hijacking off Africa.

Certainly, the operator of the car should be experienced and properly licensed. Again, as a bicyclist, I think more people should be using human power to move themselves, and not going around in multi-ton metal death boxes like it's a human right. I drive a manual transmission, so I already appreciate how people are deferring to the car's engineering, especially in boring situations.

Far from being a deus ex machina, an autonomous car is an engineered product. In principle, you can examine its code and analyze how it works. Once it works, it will work the same way every time, unless there are software updates or faults in the sensors. In contrast, your God-given brain is messy and unpredictable. The longer you go without an accident, the more complacent you become. The more safety features you have, the more careless you become. And as long as you go without accidents, the DMV does not bother testing your driving ability, but just renews your license sight-unseen. The current situation is demonstrably not safe.

The big question is whether having the car drive itself would make the humans' skills atrophy. My guess is that it would improve safety, having the humans drive only in tricky situations where they know they have to be careful. And the rest of the time, the computer would be driving with all of the safety techniques that it knows, constantly alert.

If only humans were safe, 100% in control of vehicles, when on public roads. As a bicyclist, I wish fewer humans drove cars.

The Google autonomous cars are intended and have been tested on city streets, which are emphatically not full of predictable autonomous cars. So far, they've been in 1 accident, and the other party was at fault. Humans get into that type of accident all the time.

Autonomous cars are great because they can have much faster reflexes and much deeper memories of how to avoid accidents than humans. Find a way to avoid more accidents, send an update, and all the cars running the same software would avoid those accidents in the future. Contrast that with humans, who decline with age and die, and are replaced with new idiot teenagers all the time. Google is not doing autonomous cars because they want a dystopian future without humans, like those lame protesters say, but because they're trying to save lives.

At this point, the greatest fear I have about autonomous cars is that lame regulators will make it so difficult to approve them, that they never become available to the public.

You mean this GnuTLS? (It had a "goto cleanup" bug similar to Apple's "goto fail" bug.) It isn't API compatible with OpenSSL, and OpenSSL came first. OpenSSL has first mover advantage, and more people are paranoid about GPL, even if it's LGPL.

The consensus among security experts seems to be that TLS (the protocol itself) sucks, OpenSSL sucks, GnuTLS sucks, NSS sucks, and TLS has horrible compatibility problems between implementations. They aren't giving us a lot of options, here.

So, I find it fascinating that OpenBSD is taking OpenSSL (which sucks) and trying to make LibreSSL into something that doesn't suck. I wish them the best of luck and funding.