My given legal name is "Robert Lowe". I wasn't named after the famous one (he wasn't famous when I was born) but if you do a google search on my name, you most definitely do not get me on the first dozen or so pages of hits.

I have never once had an employer disqualify me for that pesky little 1980's sex tape scandal. Sadly, no woman I've wanted to date has mistaken me for my namesake either.

Then again, maybe it's because my name double is a bit more widely known than yours. Still, these things do happen. Personally, I would be more worried about tougher and tougher sex offender laws. It may become a felony to have the same name as one some day!

As a former instructor at ITT Tech I can assure you that student retention of knowledge after a class is not that big of a problem. (Except for my select few students that did learn the material).

I never confiscated notes, come to think of it, I know of no one that did, nor did I encounter any official encouragement from the administrators to do so. The administrators did set up policies that hurt the school academically, but those were mainly geared toward stemming the tide of information we were giving our students, not in destroying their ability for future study.

Ultimately, that's why I left. The place is a degree mill with a horribly toxic environment that stifles, rather than promotes, thought and education.

I maintain that talent is not enough. You must be more talented than the ones around, or really lucky. Sometimes you do have to set others up for failure in order to make yourself come out ahead. Good for you if you've never been put in that position, but that is pure dumb luck and not something to stake your livelihood on.

Relying solely on talent and hard work is a fool's strategy. Those two things are a minimum requirement to play the game. If that's all you have, you'll either be lucky or on the streets. It is vitally important to recognize that if the choice to be made is between me and them, the correct answer is never "them".

that if you are nice, you will be screwed all the time by everyone around you. NEVER enter business, or any other type of relationship, without being possessed of the ability to utterly destroy the people around you should the need arise.

It's a ruthless world. If you are not at least a little ruthless, you will starve. If the economy is good, you may be able to nibble a few morsels that fall from the lips of those that are actually doing what it takes to make it, but in tough times, you're out.

You can achieve success, you just have to realize that you'll do it on the backs and broken dreams of your coworkers and colleagues. Suck it up and get back to it!

Just rub a little isopropyl alcohol on the contacts and it will bring any cartridge back to life. I even resurrected an oxidized atari cart this way!

Computer Science... I shudder to challenge its meaning and its validity as a term. It's a fairly recent term, which is very loosely defined. The reason I don't want to bring up its ambiguity is that its definition can still stir up controversy.

Personally, I am in the camp that says CS is the study of computation. To paraphrase the late Dr. Dijkstra, "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes." True computer science is done in proofs, mathematics, theory, not in programs. Of course, some would argue that it is about basic computer programming skills, the ability to operate a computer, and to understand its functioning.

IMHO, these functions associated with computer scientists are side effects, in much the same way that I/O is a side effect of the execution of LISP code. It is a desirable one, but is not the main goal. No, the goal of CS is to study computation, to classify problems according to their solvability as well as time and space complexity. It strives to create new, provable, algorithms. Or, barring that, to prove that no algorithm could exist to solve the problem at hand. To that end, it is a branch of mathematics. It is, in fact, a branch which offers considerable insight into other areas of mathematics.

As far as teaching basic programming skills, I think students stand a bit to gain from that as well. Obviously, theoretical computer science is not for everyone. However, as it was done with me, programming could be a "gateway drug" for the wider world of TCS. As a child of the 80's, when I went through school I picked up BASIC on my school's Apple II's. I showed a lot of promise with it, and so my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I programmed, a lot. The skills that I honed there led me to other skills. Eventually, when I said, "Is there nothing more?", I was shown the way to TCS. I suddenly discovered that programming skills had trained my mind to understand the concept of computability. Soon, I mastered the proof, and now I have the whole of mathematics at my beck and call.

So in conclusion, whether teaching outright computer science, or teaching programming, we stand a lot to gain. Our next generation of computer scientists are in our schools now. The trouble is, many that would be able to do it will probably never even hear the word. I was lucky. I was born during a period when the world was going computer crazy. In our current system, computers are now a matter of course. I often worry that because of a lack of computer education in schools, American computer scientists are a dying breed.

Just go look around at any CS program in the US. I promise that at the graduate level, you will find mainly Asians, Indians, and Russians, not Americans!

You are absolutely correct. My comment was short-sighted in that only the more math notation heavy fields use LaTex as a sort of lingu franca.

As far as a serious investment of time, I'm not sure I fully agree, unless you meant the time it takes to learn LaTeX. Personally, I can key in complex math formulae at about the same speed I can write them, but then I have years of experience with the LaTeX language.

For a tech book though, I'd say it's ideal.
It even provides markup that can be used to do code boxes, where the code is in courier. Heck, if you ever read Knuth's works on literate programming, you will find that it can be used to auto-document code, making it "rise to the level of literature" (if it's done right at least)

Also, once compiled it produces dvi files, which can then be converted into pdf, ps, even html!

Most serious academic work is done in LaTeX. My papers are all typeset in LaTeX. I use emacs to do it. The software is free (in all sense of the word), and the documentation is plentiful.

ispell will spell check it. You can run that in emacs as well, or just invoke from the command line "ispell -t". You can draw figures in any graphics program, export to eps, and then include them in your document. Tables, math, text, sections, all beautifully laid out for you.

So come on, join us Tex heads! As for the learning curve, if you can't grok LaTeX, you probably should not be authoring tech books.