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Except for Concrete Math, all of these are available on the web free of charge, and all of them are of lasting value, and well worth the cost.

Fortran does outrank C (at least until recently) in speed for various methematical computations. It has been the great mainstay of physics departments, and all the compiler optimizations went to it.

If he wants to learn a new language, good to look at Lisp from SICP.

The text for the course is available here.

This was pretty much all I did last October.
Enjoy.
Bryguy

http://aduni.org/academics/classes/
http://aduni.org/catalog/

Also there's the arsDigita Foundation which sponsers a prize for web service designed by high school age students and aDUni, a tution free computer science program. (Since I am an aDUni, this is a bit of shameless begging/advertising, but so far it has proven itself a very worthwhile program.)

But people who work for large corporations can already afford computers and internet service, and whether or not they have them is just a question of preference. There are lots of people who don't work for large corporations, and who don't own computers or pay for net service, because they spend their money on things they consider more valuable.

You'd come a lot closer to universal access with something like a phone booth. You walk up, pop in a quarter, and get ten minutes of web-surfing time. Like a real phone booth, you get anonymity as well. This would make the internet available in small amounts to people who don't want to spend much money on it. Regular users could use it to check an online PIM or a stock price.

The anonymity of a web phone booth would address many of the concerns voiced that the corporate PC giveaway is meant to track marketing data, or to enable the corporation to coerce people to work at home.

I have a friend who works for Arsdigita Corp which is a related organization but not the same as the university, and I have been looking at both the company and the university with some interest.

Anyway, the University supplies a generalize undergraduate CS program, not a votech education in particular tools. In fact, they don't teach any programming languages specifically. You have to pick up that stuff on your own.
Check out their cirriculum at the University homepage.
As for ruling out "less bright" people: They are giving their students, for free, a 4-year high level CS program in one year. Their students better be bloody bright. At that pace, they don't have time to slow down for the less-than-brilliant. I agree that SAT tests aren't a real indicator of intelligence, but I think they're using them just to make the first cut. Getting a 1400 should be no problem for the mutant-geniuses that they are trying to recruit.

After reading this this morning, I sent an email to Philip Greenspun asking about the logistics of the Distance Ed. part -- How will it work? What kind of time commitment will it require? How large will the 'classes' be? etc..

He responded right away:
"Just connect to http://arsdigita.org/university/ in September. We will not provide any support to distance learners beyond the materials."

This is a great idea, and well-implemented, I believe it can become a very useful tool for writing the doc.

We can consider it as a kind of "Content Management System". Any author (and it should be easy to be one) can come and edit a doc (of course, there is versionning) or start a new one and these can be review by all or specific people (editors...). After some favorable judging (to be defined), the doc can be part of the public doc release and so on.

At a more basic level, this kind of thing has been done a thousand times on the web (there is even a problem set part of web development course asking to implement just that cf. http://namin.arsdigita.org/dev/p sets/ps3/home.html) This is really just an outline of what a content management system should be.

By keeping everything nicely in a database, we can generate all the interfaces (XML, HTML, etc.) from a single format.

I'll try to work on this. If anybody wants to join...

Even if you don't agree with the goals of our particular organization, I think it is a good model for what any open source company should shoot for. One of the greatest contributions open source has is to broaden access to technology and I personally believe that any open source company that does not sponsor this kind of educational initiative is failing the community.

In 1996, I set up links from my site to Amazon and Computer Literacy,
asking them to write referral fee checks payable to "Angell Memorial
Animal Hospital" (see
http://photo.net/photo/donationlist.html)

I established a memorial fund there after George died.
Donations ensure that pets owned by poor people get proper treatment
and provide funding for important veterinary research.

Although two of my dogs have died in Intensive Care at Angell, I feel
that it is the best run health care organization I've seen.
Coordination among specialists is much tighter than in a hospital for
humans and no money is spent on fancy advertising campaigns,
ego-boosting interior decoration, or finding clever new ways to get
more Medicare funds.

That's Philip for you.