Current Music: James Taylor – JT – Secret O’Life

Something worries me when I start reading about high school science fairs turning into security research projects with scholarships awarded by the Department of Homeland Security (New York Times article; membership signup required – link only valid until May 23). Don’t even get me started on the name of the Department itself; just the same old tired observation that it sounds too much like fatherland for my own comfort.

I don’t know, something just strikes me as worrisome when high schoolers start thinking about chaos theory and using it in encryption algorithms. Sure, you can point me to Linus Torvalds, who wrote an entire operating system in college, but that’s another thing altogether – I would expect a college student to do something like that. But high school students?

I needed levity after that. Remember HP and Compaq’s merger – or should I say.. well, I don’t want to give the punchline away.

If you’ve got a lot of free time and more bandwidth and hard drive storage than you know what to do with, perhaps you’d like to try downloading the entire Internet?