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Hire some experts to write text books under a creative commons licence

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sell hard copies at cost

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electronic copies free as .epubs, .pdfs

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They have math, from pre-algebra to calculus plus statistics. Physics, chemistry, astronomy. biology, microbiology, economics, psychology, U.S. history

There are quite a few efforts along the lines of what you are suggesting, but Openstax is my favorite because they are well funded (Gates Foundation and Hewlett Foundation, among others), they produce a consistent, high-quality product, they don't try to suck you into their ecosystem - they just write and give away the textbooks.

The Open Textbook Network is also very good, but they are more curators of all free textbooks and not so much producers.

"Focus isn't a big problem"

WRONG.

Laser focus is a MASSIVE problem over long distances. You need to understand Gaussian optics [2nd year physics at uni] and diffraction spreading to get this right, as simple ray tracing is not sufficient to describe how the beam actually behaves.

To focus the beam down to a meaningful, and useful, size you need a very large lens. How large? Well it depends on how far the beam is going, but let's consider "to the moon" as a useful yard stick.

XKCD mentioned this briefly in one of the "What If" episodes.

But for a more rigorous treatment here are some physics notes giving an example. The example given there is quite nice: a 2.5m telescope/lens/aperture/device on the surface of the earth will project a laser "spot" on the moon that is 254m in diameter at 633nm laser wavelength. You can do the calculation yourself to find the aperture needed to focus a laser to something "useful" that could cut or drill through metal on the surface of the moon from the earth and you find those relationships reversing: the lens needs to be hundreds of meters in diameter!!!

> They are treated as legal persons for very good reasons that go back hundreds of years for certain purpose.

Total nonsense. Corporations became legal persons OVER time based on greed TO LIMIT LIABILITY. Corporations want all the benefits and do everything in their power to avoid having to pay for them.

Date Decision, Legal Right Affirmed
1889 "Minneapolis and St. L. R. Co. v. Beckwith", Right for judicial review on state legislation
1893 "Noble v. Union River Logging R. Col", Right for judicial review for rights infringement by federal legislation
1906 "Hale v. Henkel", Protection "against unreasonable searches and seizures (4th)
1908 "Armour Packing C. v. United States", Right to trial by jury (6th)
1922 "Pennsylvania Coal Co. V. Mahon", Right to compensation for government takings
1962 "Fong Foo v. United States", Right to freedom from double jeopardy (5th)
1970 "Ross v. Bernhard", Right to trial by jury in civil case (7th)
1976 "Virginia Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Consumer Council)", Right to free speech for purely commercial speech (1st)
1978 "First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti", Right to corporate political speech (1st)
1986 "Pacific Gas and Electric Company v. Public Utility Commn of California", Right against coerced speech (1st)

Reference:
* A Short History of the Corporation
http://cnx.org/content/m17314/latest/

Also see:
http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=314

Specifically, "The Corporation complete film transcript (PDF)"
http://hellocoolworld.com/files/TheCorporation/Transcript_finalpt1%20copy.pdf
http://hellocoolworld.com/files/TheCorporation/Transcript_finalpt2%20copy.pdf

A narrow or steep 4 foot deep river can move very fast!

There are hundreds of free college textbooks out there on the web -- see my sig for a catalog.

There are basically two models that have been proved to work. (1) Do it yourself. (2) Set up nonprofit online collaborations so people can cooperate on producing high-quality free books.

#1 is actually the most successful model by far. Just do it. Bite the bullet. Write the damn book and put it online for free. Here are some very high quality examples of DIY textbook projects: Hefferon, Linear Algebra, Carroll, Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Petkovsek et al., A=B.

The best example of an organization doing #2 is the Connexions project, which is run by Rice University. Other examples are Curriki and CK-12. These folks all use permissive licenses such as CC-BY, which encourages people to cooperate and view their work as contributing to a commons.

I first heard about Flat World Knowledge in 2008. What was never clear to me was what they were bringing to the table that was worthwhile or interesting. I doubt that they can afford to provide any of the services a traditional publisher would provide, such as professional copyediting or professional illustrations. Flat World Knowledge uses CC-BY-NC licensing, which is not free. That means that their authors know they're not contributing to a commons. At most they may hope to make some insignificant amount of money. What's the point?

> All justices, judges, and magistrates accept that corporations are legal persons. This is neither surprising, nor debatable, and is a fundamental part of Common Law tradition.

Total nonsense. Corporations became legal persons OVER time.

Date Decision, Legal Right Affirmed
1889 "Minneapolis and St. L. R. Co. v. Beckwith", Right for judicial review on state legislation
1893 "Noble v. Union River Logging R. Col", Right for judicial review for rights infringement by federal legislation
1906 "Hale v. Henkel", Protection "against unreasonable searches and seizures (4th)
1908 "Armour Packing C. v. United States", Right to trial by jury (6th)
1922 "Pennsylvania Coal Co. V. Mahon", Right to compensation for government takings
1962 "Fong Foo v. United States", Right to freedom from double jeopardy (5th)
1970 "Ross v. Bernhard", Right to trial by jury in civil case (7th)
1976 "Virginia Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Consumer Council)", Right to free speech for purely commercial speech (1st)
1978 "First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti", Right to corporate political speech (1st)
1986 "Pacific Gas and Electric Company v. Public Utility Commn of California", Right against coerced speech (1st)
Reference:
http://cnx.org/content/m17314/latest/

Also see:
http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=314
Specificaly, "The Corporation complete film transcript (PDF)"
http://hellocoolworld.com/files/TheCorporation/Transcript_finalpt1%20copy.pdf
http://hellocoolworld.com/files/TheCorporation/Transcript_finalpt2%20copy.pdf

> Because otherwise, they couldn't own property, and could not be sued.
At one time in America they couldn't OWN other corporations. This limited the collateral damage they could do. This was a GOOD thing.

> Let's have a hypothetical.
The fact that OWNERS wanted to separate their liability is based on thing: Greed.

Corporations pay no death tax (estate tax) because corporations NEVER die. That fact right there is a HUGE problem. It slowly strips the wealth (power) out of individuals and consolidates it -- total anathema to the original intent of State and Federal separation and balance of power.

It would behoove you to watch "The Corporation"

The worst part about this is that the DA office doesn't seem to understand that "Stand Your Ground" is just an affirmative defense against a crime, not a magic spell that means someone can't be arrested.

If only the same applied to fair use as a defense against charges of copyright infringement!

. . . now as to shrinking that scanning tunneling microscope . . . that might take a while . . .

Is anyone aware of how "big" they are . . . I'm not thinking that the word "small" is appropriate . . .

Example

Check out Connexions. They have a model where individuals with expertise create small modules, and then people can combine those to create larger works.

Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.)

I teach physics, not math, but here are some existing math books that I consider to be of pretty high quality:

1. Hefferon, Linear Algebra, http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html/ (BY-SA license)
2. Judson, Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications, http://abstract.ups.edu/ (GFDL license)
3. Corral, Trigonometry, http://mecmath.net/trig/ (GFDL license)
4. Keisler, Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals, http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html (CC-BY-NC-SA license)
5. Illowsky and Dean, Collaborative Statistics, http://cnx.org/content/col10522/latest/ (CC-BY license)

The lack of color in the printed versions of free books is never going to change. The cost of producing a book in color is high enough that no significant number of students will ever choose it voluntarily over a free digital book. This may become less relevant as more and more students start carrying a tablet or a laptop in their backpacks.

Proofreading, error checking, and increasing the number of exercises are all things that could definitely benefit from a wider collaborative effort, and I don't think they require government funding as proposed by Steinberg. E.g., my own physics texts are free, and I've benefited a lot over the years from having people send me emails pointing out errors. I do have a few exercises from other people's physics books that are under compatible licenses, but not very many.

High quality art would definitely be a huge plus for free textbooks. My wife paid a couple of people to do art for her free French textbook, but in general, illustrations are an area where government funding really might make a huge difference.

A lot of neat synthesized compounds have been found in nature after they've been made by people. A very similar example is how last year using very similar methods buckyballs (big carbon molecules with 60 carbon atoms in the shape of soccer balls) have been found in space http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/07/carbon_buckyballs_found_in_spa.html. Buckyballs have also been found on Earth in craters from meteorites and they are believed to have been made in the impact. Since buckyballs are large enough to contain very small molecules, there's been work trying to take these buckyballs and trying to extract atoms which were inadvertently trapped during the C60 formation. http://cnx.org/content/m14355/latest/ There's hope that this technique can help us learn about atmospheric issues from long ago as well as learn about isotope ratios and the like.

Unfortunately, Spitzer will not be operating forever. Indeed Spitzer has already run out of liquid helium, making most of its sensitive instruments inoperable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope. Spitzer will likely have very little functionality by 2020. There's some slight good news in that Spitzer is in a heliocentric rather than geocentric orbit, so it won't need to be deorbited (often we need to deorbit satellites so that they don't contribute more space junk or engage in uncontrolled deorbits and hit something back on Earth). So Spitzer can keep working until the very end of its instruments.

The really bad news is that there's a lot of effort to cancel the James Webb Telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope which will replace a lot of what Spitzer does and some of what Hubble does. Without Webb, when Spitzer goes, the US will have essentially no major space based telescope capacity. We will have let all that capacity be in the hands of Europe, Japan and China. Just as the center of particle physics moved to Europe when the LHC was built their and the SSC was canceled, so two the center of astrophysics may move to Europe. We are engaging in a slow steady decline. Neil deGrasse Tyson summarized the problem very well- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_F3pw5F_Pc- We have stopped dreaming. The American dream is ending. We might yet stop it, but right now it looks like the US is going the way of all failed empires, falling slowly into stagnation.

Proper utilization of lambdas and closures pretty much make a lot of design patterns (template, strategy, visitor, for example) unnecessary in many contexts.

I love lambdas but I don't have a lot of experience using them in large projects. I use the Visitor pattern a lot so I'm really curious to learn how lambdas can be used to avoid it. Can you post an example? Thanks!

Every replacement has to be done in a case by case basis. Not all instances of those patterns can be replaced with lambdas.

Using the visitor sample from here, one could do the following (trivial example, I know):

class ConcreteVisitorB extends AElement{
void VisitConcreteElementA(ConcreteElementA & a ){ a.operationA(); }
}

class ConcreteElementA extends AElement {
public void accept(AVisitor v) {
v.VisitConcreteElementA(this);
}

public void operationA() {
// an atomic, intrinsic opertion on ConcreteElementA objects.
}
}

can be replaced with this:

auto lambdaA = [](ConcreteElementA & v ){ v.operationA(); }
auto donothing = [](AElement & v) { /* yo! nothing here */ }

class ConcreteElementA extends AElement {
public void accept( [](AElement & v ) {
v(this);
}

public void operationA() {
// an atomic, intrinsic opertion on ConcreteElementA objects.
}
}

Obviously this is a trivial example. For real-world examples, one has to make an engineering decision of whether to replace a particular pattern or composition construct with a lambda, depending on a lot more factors than just coding aesthetics.

all of this is relatively new, but having a way to make graphene inexpensively and reliably in any lab (the whole scotch tape pencil method) allows researches all over the world to make some and study it. As for being a "fad", as TFA states, the scientists aren't promising the next big thing, but are tempering excitement with caution.

At the very least this could have been couched with a "might" or a "maybe"

Blame the journalist who wrote the article, not the scientist. Scientific papers always give the exact range of confidence one can have on its conclusions and usually the raw data is available so you can draw your own conclusions.

No matter how accurately we can observe an exoplanet from Earth, at this distance, most of that interpreted data is not much better than a guess.

More accurate observations are no better than inaccurate observations, is that what you mean? Do you think that if the distance is big enough then there's absolutely no way you can improve the accuracy of your observations? That notion has been disproved long ago.

I've got some news for you, the Middle Ages called and they want their stupidity back.

http://www.jamesbrennan.org/algebra/ Nicely done Algebra 1 text. No problem set, however. http://cnx.org/content/m19435/latest/ Don't let the somewhat klutzy organization of this text put you off. What this guy is doing is running you through Algebra 2 by discovering it for yourself. This is the text I use at the small charter school where I teach, and it's working well with kids who have never, ever gotten school at all! Good luck to you.

All high tech industrial processes uses toxic substances. All Chinese factories release waste with little regard for the environmental impact. But producing solar panels is not at all more eco unfriendly than other products like, say semiconductors. It is unfair and incorrect to characterize solar panels as a huge biohazard like the GP did "chemicals so toxic that they kill you instantly."

Let me know if you're interested in hearing more about Connexions. I haven't had time to review all of the contents as this has turned into a really deep discussion, but I can tell you that it addresses several of the concerns here: searchable by Google, free access for students, print-on-demand options as well as online access, and completely open (CC-by) licensing of content. For those arguing against giving away content because of lack of ROI, I recently posted a blog post describing several ways that authors can actually benefit from using a site like Connexions (or, to be fair, any widely-viewed open education site). My role is as the primary author and community support person, as well as a "salesman" of sorts, so if you have any questions or want help getting started with authoring, feel free to give me a shout at cnx at cnx.org and I'll be more than happy to assist.

Regardless of which site or service you end up going with (all have their own pros/cons and licensing philosophies, so it's certainly not one-size-fits-all), I definitely encourage you to think about open licensing, and would be happy to chat about that even if you have no interest in Connexions itself.

Connexions (http://cnx.org) is a project for open source book material that is designed to enable teachers to "mix & match" books that are then printed on demand. There are 2336 hits for "computer" in the catalog. No idea if any of that is useful to you. http://cnx.org/content/search?target=&words=computer&allterms=weakAND&search=Go There is also content on "open source in education": http://cnx.org/lenses/rgardler/foss

Connexions (http://cnx.org) is a project for open source book material that is designed to enable teachers to "mix & match" books that are then printed on demand. There are 2336 hits for "computer" in the catalog. No idea if any of that is useful to you. http://cnx.org/content/search?target=&words=computer&allterms=weakAND&search=Go There is also content on "open source in education": http://cnx.org/lenses/rgardler/foss

Strange I was just researching MapReduce online when this slashdot posting appeared.

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/MapReduce/paper.pdf
http://cnx.org/content/m20644/latest/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System

Patent examiners need to get their heads examined.

Patents, a strange concept anyhow to have a government imposed monopoly. Revoke your governments power to have patents. That should take care of the pesky problem. Prior art helps too.

Never? You may know something because you've seen it, but if you add it to Wikipedia saying you _saw_ it happen, it won't fly. You still have to be published by an authoritative source.

PS: I wanted to let everyone know about this site which I once read to catch just the basics of what signal processing (I think, could be something else) was about. It's called Connexions and it's pretty cool. (I'm not affiliated to the site)

I would also add Connexions to the list,a similar sort of project out of Rice University that allows institutions to custom build textbooks. http://cnx.org/

Connexions from Rice University allows authors to write interconnected modules that do not necessarily follow a linear path. A student can read the material online or create a PDF. One of its main drawbacks from an author's standpoint, that input from LaTeX was not accepted, seems to be on the way to being solved. Still, it is clear that from looking at some of the better modules there that at least in the sciences and engineering, a significant amount of time and expense in writing a good textbook go into making quality illustrations, figures, and for online textbooks, animations or videos.

I doubt they're wasting too much money.

I graduated college a few years ago. One of the projects some peers of mine undertook for an undergraduate class took several songs as inputs to form a basis of judgement of other songs, thus enabling their classification by genre. They uploaded this progress to an free learning website, similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare, called Connexions.

A link to the "course" my friends created describing their project: http://cnx.org/content/col10216/latest/

(The following year I took this same course; we were able to identify the volume, pitch and duration of a clarinet based on samples we created. This would enable the acquisition of the melody as described in the article summary through trivial code manipulation.)

That's pretty much the concept behind the Connexions project. I'd suggest checking out Richard Baraniuk's TED Talk for more info. While there's not a lot of stuff up there now (as compared to what could be), it's a start.

I would imagine that using part of that $100m to pay bounties for specific subjects, to help finance translating material to other languages, or coming up with a way to mix together the info in a multimedia format that could be easily integrated into Wikipedia would be, as the kids today say, "for teh win". :)

Connexions - online textbook repository. All XML-ized.

http://cnx.org/

And the Google Techtalk:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6852287090 518403675&q=http%3A%2F%2Fcnx.org%2F

From the website:

"Connexions is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help

* authors publish and collaborate
* instructors rapidly build and share custom courses
* learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines."

There's not much Computer Science material there yet, but there are quite a few Engineering and Bioinformatics modules, and the most popular modules are on introductory music theory!

Also be sure to check out the Google video presentation. I've seen this presentation live and it's pretty amazing what they're doing. For any of the content online, they can produce a full bound textbook for a fraction of the cost of normal textbooks.