Another fine submission by Dr. Kahle details the sad story of how people are cheating the SETI@Home ranking system. How sad. There are good reasons to break computer systems, but breaking this one is just plain evil. I hope the Netherlands team responsible for the controversey gets a swift boot to the head. Losers.

Dr. Kahle sent us a link to a nice NYTimes piece on UNIX and C father Brian Kernighan, who is teaching computer classes to liberal arts students at Princeton. K&R C is still, in my opinion, the quintessential programming book and one that completely demystified the language for me. When you think of how much of modern computing was influenced by Kernighan, Ritchie, and the other luminaries of their day, it's really quite unbelievable. It's also very interesting how ultra-modesty seems to be a trait of great computer scientists.