I don't understand formal methods. A group has claimed to have formally verified the L4 kernel. What does this mean? I suppose that this means that specification of the kernel has been written as a mathematical proof. Then it must have been demonstrated that the C code exactly matched the …

Like many others, I read Paul Graham's Lisp essays and thought I should give Lisp a go. I installed Clojure and wrote my first Lisp program:

(defn num_books
 ([dist]
   (num_books dist 0 0))
 ([dist achieved nbooks]
 (if
   (>= achieved dist)
   nbooks
   (num_books dist
       (+ achieved
           (/ 1
               (+ nbooks 2)))
       (+ nbooks 1)))))

(println (num_books …

Here's a painting of E.M.Forster. Note that his head is pointy at the back. This is believed to be source of his literary powers.

I was in a cafe and someone there recommended Forster, so I got Where Angels Fear To Tread from the library. It was his …

I'm impressed you're going to try out Ubuntu! You'll probably have to install it from a USB stick:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

Let me know how you get on.

It seems that MS has quashed the initial early stand that Linux made on netbooks.

This afternoon I'm collecting my shiny new netbook (n110). It comes with XP. I look forward to trying Ubuntu on it, I think there is even a netbook tailored version. I'm also confident that I'll …

Thanks Will, I've updated my post to correct the muddled terminology you pointed out.

You're right, of course, you can have SSO without the ID scheme. But even those have an identity provider, which will be subject to government requests to allow access to consolidated information about people. Better not to have that all together in one place.

And what concerns me is that …

Actually, Yahoo! does not implement directed identity. They DO support identifier select along with an opaque identifier, but the identifier is the same for every relying party. I actually wrote on this topic yesterday: http://willnorris.com/p/797

But you can have SSO without a government ID card scheme. OpenId gives you that, and you can use it now. My point is that SSO should be left out of the ID card debate, it's not relevant.

In the link you give, Peter Williams writes: "The identity provider would, of course, understand that all these single use identities are really all part of the same identity." That's the problem with the the SSO that really interests me: the UK government's ID card/ID database. The identity provider …