When I read Stallman's "Right to Read" more than 10 years ago, I thought it was more evidence that he is a crank. Look at it now: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html. Why is he always so right?

What is that?

The integer 1 usually works.

When I start coding, I often find that I don't completely understand things that I thought I did. While calling eig() from a matlab prompt does not require understanding much linear algebra. I think writing code often is a better way to clarify and demonstrate understanding than working examples.

That's what annoyed me too. If one were proactive enough to shift the paradigm, how many exponential racetracks could one fit in the width of human hair?

Human hair thickness varies by a factor of 10.

Unix was so much easier to comprehend and had such nice tools compared to the DEC RSX OS and documentation that it replaced on PDP-11s. Just to know where to find something in the DEC documentation, you had to have read it before. I finally simply read all four feet of that stuff. (I think it was in orange 3 ring binders.)

He has been awfully good at forecasting and at figuring out how creative people can organize for their mutual benefit. When I saw the headline, Stallman's "Right to Read" was the first thing I thought of. I expected it to be cited in an early posting.

As a professor for 15 years I grew to dislike publishers of journals and textbooks. I hope that free journals and textbooks replace current publishers. Perhaps the money that authors of popular texts make will stand in the way, but there are already some good texts available on line.

I don't like Noah Shachtman or his work. I last thought about him when he wrote something about Los Alamos, NM, which I know well. His article was misleading and had a misplaced sense of excitement and drama. At the time, I checked out some of his other work and found that it was similar.

I put him in with Dvorak. I ignore what he says.

I learned python out of the first edition of Lutz and Ascher. I just pulled out my copy for the first time in years. The last page number is 366. I use Beazley's "Python Essential Reference" almost daily. Not having taught python and not having learned it twice from two books, I don't have much to say about what would be a better introduction. I recommend python the language and Beazley's book. I never found Lutz and Ascher's book (first edition) useful as a reference.

Right! The last Apple product that i bought was an early Mac. Writing code for it was unnecessarily difficult because Apple was protecting the secrets of the "OS". I used SUN products for a while after that, but since really open systems became available I've used them exclusively. I will do the same thing with phones.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory addresses the USB menace by encasing the physical ports in epoxy.

You are right about what he's looking for. But Google is hurting his business by making access to his competitors' products easy and cheap/free.

I think Roger Cohen of the New York Times was there. The New Yorker also has printed a few unattributed pieces written in Iran recently.