Wow ... some of these letters are like New Math all over again.

Brin wants the classic BASIC precisely because of its limitations. The moment you say the word 'compiler' you are at least one order of magnitude too complex. Your modern programmer can probably do algebra in their sleep -- but kids still get shown two apples and two more apples and asked how many apples they have now. The point of the ultra-limited BASIC was not to enable the accomplishment of useful tasks, but to help the development of useful ways to think about the world.

Most of the more modern languages are also vastly less redundant in their coding style, with Perl and C being good examples. BASIC, by contrast, gives you lots more surface area to read and understand what the computer is doing for you, even while it reduces the possible range of what it can represent. This lack of efficiency is the kiss of death to a professional programmer, but it is exactly what a 9 year old needs.

Line-by-line programming is like learning to speak sentences. Eventually we want them to plan out that book report, but first we just want a good sentence to come out of their mouths. At some point, kids might write a program too big to be comfortably understood in BASIC. At that point, it will be time to move on.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060828fa_fact

A really good Malcolm Gladwell article from August covering the exact question about GM's health care crisis. Really useful to help put the whole picture together.

Ok, here's a tricky question. When the rules force the carrier who has leased the spectrum to allow consumer supplied devices, does it in effect force them to open the spectrum up in order to do this?

If this is worded just right, it prevents incumbents from paying the 'blocking premium' to obtain the spectrum and leaving it fallow. If they leave it fallow, then customers cannot supply their own devices and connect and they are in violation. Whether or not the rules work this way would depend heavily on their exact wording.

I appear to be the lone Canadian arguing this point for our spectrum. Industry Canada recently completed a round of comments on upcoming spectrum auctions [1], and my comments are in the very bottom of the initial comments page [2]. Everyone else wanted to talk about setasides for new bidders. In reviewing the comments, I appeared to be the only one suggesting consideration of the economic effects of carrier device lock-in.

[1] http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/smt-gst.nsf/en/h_sf01714e.html

[2] http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/smt-gst.nsf/vwapj/dgtp-002-07-chris-smith.pdf/$FILE/dgtp-002-07-chris-smith.pdf

Economics is ultimately stronger than the law. Always has been -- always will be.

There is no need to create or enforce a legal barrier where there is already an economic one.

It's not that the lineup is composed of people who are aliens, illegal or otherwise. The lineup could be composed entirely of returning American citizens - the point is that there is no lineup when you travel one way, but a huge lineup the other. This will be true even though the numbers of people traveling both ways may be exactly the same.

Perhaps you can confirm some details of that Amazon Downloader. According to Amazon, you may use it for individual tracks, but you must use it for albums.

Since the downloader is limited to Mac, and Windows XP/Vista, does this mean that anyone running an older version of Windows or any other OS can't buy albums? For the record there are many MP3 players which simply connect as a USB mass storage device - supported by Linux. Even the iPod can be convinced to work with older versions of Windows, although you have to give up on iTunes.

Insisting on Windows or Mac in order to buy albums seems a little at odds with the idea of an MP3 music store.

I can't help but shake my head at the simplistic idea that making it warmer will automatically make it easier to get at oil and gas resources.

Making it warmer also makes ice turn to water, as anyone keeping an eye on glaciers or Greenland can see. And if that really takes off, then you have a rising sea level problem to deal with

Go check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sn%C3%B8hvit and look at the photo. A sea level rise of even a metre will make life very interesting on the island of Melkoya

For a better look at the island, check out

http://maps.google.ca/?ll=70.69,23.59&spn=0.012,0.058&t=h

and imagine what the weather can be like. A difference in sea level of one metre could mean a lot.