It's always been hard for me to deal with how to balance my role in the military with my fairly left-of-center political positions. I'm proud to serve, and very appreciative of what being a member of the US Armed Services has meant for me. Be that as may, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance that comes with putting the uniform on and knowing that the majority of people who I agree with politically find something deeply disturbing about my job.

Probably one of the hardest parts of my service in recent memory, certainly the only thing that's given me such a visceral feeling of shame, was reading about Abu Ghraib and the horrors that US Military members had inflicted on the prisoners there. At the time it happened I was in a leadership role, and up until that point very positive about what I was doing. Seeing those pictures made me doubt my decision to stay on as a reservist more than any thing I've seen before or after, and undercut my confidence and motivation to lead.

One of the things I clung to was the knowledge that this information came to light because at least one soldier was willing to speak up, and communicate what was going on to someone. Someone had been willing to take a stand.

Since then, the swift waning of outrage and public memory of Abu Ghraib has saddened me. Abu Ghraib should have been a lesson that US Military personnel would hold in their mind's eye whenever they made any decisions about how they treat people that they have power over. The quick departure from the press of critical inquiry about the responsibility for those actions and inactions at Abu Ghraib was deeply frustrating.

Thank-you Salon, for continuing to communicate Abu Ghraib to the world. Thanks to whomever in CID who was willing to give you the pictures and details you used to publish these recent articles. Keep up the good work.

Let's hope it helps the current and the next generation of US servicemen and servicewomen learn from our mistakes.

David,

I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree pretty strongly that the interfaces of perl, or shell, or python, or ... fill in the blank with your favorite scripting language - somehow don't give you the simplistic, do-it-yourself interface that BASIC did.

I, like a lot of my generation, grew up on the Pets, the TRS-80's, the Vic-20's, and the C-64's. I first learned assembler on a Commodore 64 when I was 12 or so, and I agree that it was much easier for me to get to that point because I was able to experiment with the BASIC language. But then, unlike a lot of my peers, I took a 10 year hiatus from programming, and didn't get really back into it until grad school. Learning C was a huge pain in the butt for me, C++ even more so, to the point that I gave up on programming altogether and focused more on the application integration side of things & experimented with security subsystems that were more fun (and simple) to play with.

For me, BASIC was the thing that allowed a 12-year old kid to program a computer. It was wonderfully liberating.

But I disagree pretty stringently that the same, simplistic interface isn't available on any modern computer. Throw in a knoppix CDROM (no installation required), and an 8-year old boy can figure out how to make just about any computer become a linux workstation that features a native interface that includes one of the most simplistic programming languages I'm aware of - the bourne shell.

The 8-year old boy of my example throws in a knoppix CDROM to his parent's computer (or starts up his $100, MIT-provided, laptop if he happens to live in the thirld world), clicks on a terminal icon, and starts typing:

VAR="Hello World!"

echo $VAR

And see's his computer screen show:

Hello World!

How different is that from a bit of basic code? How hard is it to use "printf" to move a dot across the screen? And even perl (or perlsh, for the adventurous) offers a fairly simple interface.

I really don't understand why you're fixating on the need for BASIC when very many common, simple program languages are just a few feet away from you in the form of knoppix CD.

Mark

And to all those who praised BASIC's ability to interact with the underpinnings of the operating system with PEEK's and POKES, I would like to point out the "/proc" filesysem on Linux:

echo "parameter" > /proc/thing/I/want/to/change

Lets you tinker with the underpinnings of just about any part of the operating system. And you don't even have to resort to a book to figure out what memory address to POKE to.

David, I love your Science Fiction, your writings on privacy, your understanding of how technology affects humanity in so many subtle and unsubtle ways, but....

I think you had some fairly large blinders on when you wrote this article. Or didn't put enough effort into coming up with arguments that would convince your likely target audience.

Mark