...Ours is a government of laws, not of men. That means if the President disagrees with a law or feels that it is insufficient, he still must obey it. Ignoring the law is illegal, even for the President. The President may ask Congress to change the law, but meanwhile he must follow it.

Our President has chosen to declare himself above the law, a dangerous precedent that could do great harm to our country. However, without substantial effort on the part of you, and I mean you, every person reading this, nothing much is going to happen. The rule of law will continue to decay in our country. Future Presidents will claim even greater extralegal authority, and our nation will fall into despotism. I mean that sincerely. For the sake of yourself, your children and your children's children, you cannot allow this to stand.

Reader Robert Uhl writes:

Unfortunately for your position, the Bush-authorised wiretaps were quite likely legal; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act explicitly allows the President or Attorney General to authorise a wiretap without a court order for up to one year. There are conditions, and the whole thing is explained at http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins200512190859.asp.

ITConversations has a recording of an interesting panel discussion at Accelerating Change 2005 on The Prospects for AI with Neil Jacobstein, Patrick Lincoln, Peter Norvig and Bruno Olshausen.

I have no idea how Google ranks images when you search for them using Google Images. For whatever reason I get a lot of klicks via the Google Images route. The most popular search search terms that lead to lispmeister.com are:

1. cigar
2. lego
3. calvin and hobbes
4. flea
5. barber
6. big cigar
7. lisp
8. emp bomb
9. theory of everything
10. mathematical

Mike asked for two new T-shirt designs. Unfortunately spreadshirt.com does not provide olive colored T-shirt stock in the US. I decided to use ash colored T-shirts instead. New suggestions for designs are always welcome.

Computer source code has words and sentence structure like actual prose or even poetry. Writing code for the computer is like writing an essay. It should be written for other people to read, understand and modify. These are some of the thoughts behind literate programming proposed by Donald Knuth. This is also one of the ideas behind Open Source.

Here's a short biographical sketch about Robert Lefkowitz on O'Reilly Radar.

Calypso and Jennifer asked for Lisp Girl themed T-shirts. That was all the excuse I needed to create the shirts displayed above. Now, wouldn't one of them make a nice Christmas surprise for the geek you adore? [US shop] [DE shop]

Kovacs, as a protagonist, carries 'Woken Furies', as he carried his previous two books. He is a true anti-hero - he believes in no causes, is cynical and embittered and isolates himself. He is willing to kill without qualms if he feels the situation demands it. But despite this, seeing the world through his eyes allows us to deal with the crushing reality of this universe - a universe in which corporate violence and petty aristocratic rule is backed up with unstoppable military force; in which everyone else is ground under. Revolutions are not glorious and often do more harm than good. Kovacs has seen everything, literally, firsthand and from most perspectives. His cynicism is deserved.

Warner Brothers secured the film rights to Marke Forces.

Waiting for Real Artificial Intelligence

The 1980's saw the early commercialization of artificial intelligence with a wave of new AI companies forming and going public. Unfortunately, many made the mistake of concentrating on a powerful but inherently inefficient interpretive language called LISP, which had been popular in academic AI circles. The commercial failure of LISP and the AI companies that emphasized it created a backlash. The field of AI started shredding its constituent disciplines, and companies in natural-language understanding, character speech recognition, robotics, machine vision, and other areas originally considered part of the AI discipline now shunned association with the fields label.

By the way, his closing chapter titled "How to Build an Intelligent Machine in Three Easy Paradigms" is really horrible. Recursion, neural nets and genetic algorithms? Come on, you can't be serious!

If I had to recommend a readable introduction on AI to anyone who's not a programmer, it would be the chapter on "Thinking Machines" in K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation.

Update:Thanks Paul F. Dietz, Jim Thompson and Nolan Eakins for pointing it out: it's Ray Kurzweil not Rudy Rucker who wrote "The Age of Spiritual Machines".

About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.

"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards - a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her - that's what her grammar engine is for - or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the solepurpose of owning chattel slaves.

Conrad Barsky, author of Casting SPELs in Lisp created a really cool logo for Lisp based software projects.

Why an Alien Lisp Mascot? To most programmers, Lisp seems like an entirely alien language at first- One thing that I think the Lisp community has failed to do is convince other programmers that this strangeness is not an arbitrary obstacle, but a necessary adjustment that imparts great power to programmers that would otherwise be unattainable. The alien Lisp mascot and quirky logo designs are designed to accentuate the awesome (and, to most people, alien) power that Lisp languages have- At the same time, they show how fun Lisp programming tends to be and that Lisp has wide appeal far beyond the stuffy academia it is sometimes wrongly associated with.

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RewriteRule ^.* http://www.ctyme.com/comment-spam.html
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Heise.de had a very interesting article about Remote physical device fingerprinting. It even works through NAT firewalls. They can even distinguish VMWare based honeynets. Amazing.

Just keeping up with the Joneses here, I've been thinking about initiating a Lisp themed podcast. The design above will be available on tshirts from the Lispmeister tshirt shop by the end of this week. I'll give away a tshirt to anyone who does a Lisp themed podcast. I'm even willing to host the cast at lispmeister.com, if you don't want to bother with it yourself. Just send me the MP3, MP4 or AAC with your recording and I'll do some post-processing if necesary and put it up for downloading.

Here are some ideas about what might be interesting to listeners interested in catching the Lisp bug:

• How to use SLIME
• Why Lisp?
• Lisp and the Web
• Howto about any Common Lisp library or module
• Interviews with Lisp developers at local Lisp meetings
• The Road to Lisp interviews

So let me know what you think about it.

I gave her a leather bound lab journal and a Fisher Space Pen as an enrollment present. It's never to early to nurture a geek.

Happy school enrollment day Stella!

ChangeSafe is a complex piece of software. Revision control and configuration management is tricky enough, but we wanted to solve an even more difficult problem, that of making revision control and configuration management look easy. To do this, we needed a new computer language: one in which versioned data structures are built in, one that allows us to switch our viewpoint from a single instant of time to the entire history of the stored data, one in which the primitive operations of assignment and object creation can themselves be reflected back into the language as objects to be manipulated. Of course this new language needs all the usual features --- numbers, strings, arithmetic, procedures etc. --- and we'll make heavy use of some advanced features --- multi-threading, structured error handling, reflection --- and we want a rich set of auxiliary libraries --- collections, web stuff like sockets, http, and html generation, database connectivity. We can't forget the infrastructure tools like debuggers, profilers, and a reasonable IDE. But metalinguistic abstraction --- inventing custom computer languages --- doesn't mean that you have to start from scratch. Some computer languages make it easy and natural to extend the core language with new language constructs. That is why, with the exception of the little Java applet that runs on the client machine, all of ChangeSafe is written in Common Lisp.