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If you're gonna do paranoid, you might as well do it right.

What's the point? We all know that Intel puts special logic in that changes the operation of the CPU given certain parameters. That's why Intel RdRand isn't directly accessible but has to be accessed through the hashing logic unit. That way They just have to sneak in a small bit of malware that will hose up your RNG and then your keys can be trivially cracked into the future.

Then we have the news that GCC has been compromised for years, and all of the linux distros need to be completely recompiled (that's gonna hurt the mirrors).

(apply Poe's Law liberally but don't miss the broader point)

What are the reasons we want privacy?

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html

... as no one has actually been punished for this.

Punished? Of course they have -- they still work there, don't they?

(I was going to go for the "comfy Chair" line -- but, well, that just seemed as easy as shooting congressmen in a barrel. Waay too easy.)

Isn't MRI practically NMR? NMR is used for chemical analysis. Then how come MRI machines can't be programmed to do the same?

I think they have/are been: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9339439 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23494381 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12891651 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/brain-imaging-0301.html

My point was that this is mainly useful on programs that already have flaws

How many programs don't?

I strongly recommend reading (or at least doing a quick pass over) http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/ub:apsys12.pdf to get an idea of the scope of the problem.

Or perhaps the world's poor, many of whom don't have access to grid electricity as it stands can bypass that step and go directly to solar power. How much would a 1 kW solar panel with a battery improve the lives of many rural people in Africa who have to go into town every week to charge up their cell phones and have no electric light at night?

Wind power is simpler and cheaper. So is small scale hydroelectic, which can be done with a small electric motor. Steam power heated by solar energy is also a good way to go. Bill Gates should start making drop-in hydro, wind or solar power stations, complete with liquid metal batteries. Nuclear isn't going anywhere with the current terrorist situation. He needs to drop that approach.

I should have mentioned in the original post that investigative reporter Marisa Taylor of the McClatchy newspaper group has a PGP public key (7DCA14DC) that can be used to securely contact her. I've signed it with my own key (316A947C).

I should have mentioned in the original post that investigative reporter Marisa Taylor of the McClatchy newspaper group has a PGP public key (7DCA14DC) that can be used to securely contact her. I've signed it with my own key (316A947C).

And nothing has happened. The amount of radiation released from the leak, while the leak should be repaired ASAP, is minute and is still LOWER than the background radiation.

[citation needed]

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N13/yost.html

That link has nothing to do with you claim. It is also very old, and as it turns out wildly optimistic.

And nothing has happened. The amount of radiation released from the leak, while the leak should be repaired ASAP, is minute and is still LOWER than the background radiation. http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N13/yost.html If you have taken College Chemistry, you'll know why even the radiation released from the leak is nothing compared to both the background radiation in the ocean due to dilution and not even a drop in the bucket compared to the radiation released from nuclear testing we conducted in the Pacific Ocean.

Try asking anyone under 30 if they know what the phrase "Papers Please!" denotes

It's just two words... It's a lot of things.

It's when the Military place soldiers in a natural disaster area such as New Orleans after Katrina requiring you to show military ID or proof of government authorization, to avoid arrest, or having vehicles impounded

It's an attack onAmerican birthright citizenship

It's two words that succinctly describe America's dark future.

Personal and Professional Encounters with Surveillance

anti-state.com: May I See Your Papers Please?

It's what Mr. Hiibel of Nevada went to jail for refusing to comply with

It's what police do now to ordinary people minding their own business.

It's congress work on the REAL ID act

It's a name given to a section of an Arizona law upheld by the Supreme court.

It's the name of a complaint against changes the US is making starting this Fall 2013 to further restrict the free travel of Americans and greatly increase the difficulty of US citizens getting passports

It's the name of a dystopian video game about communist immigration control.

It's the name of an anti-TSA blog

It's a request you comply with when asked by the police; otherwise, you face immediate arrest.

• Texas 77 year old Grandmother arrested after refusing to show ID
• Police arrest for refusing to show ID while on private property
• Exhibit 1
• Exhibit 2: According to the Supreme Court, the police may arrest for failure to identify
• Arrested at Circuit City for refusing to show ID: "It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City, and it ended when a police officer arrested me for refusing to provide my driver's license."
• I follow the blog of a guy who walked across the country (California to New York) last year. He was arrested in Greencastle, Indiana last summer, after a prison worker called the police to report him as a suspicious person after they exchanged words while he was walking past the prison complex.
• Florida Cops Tase man for refusing to show ID
• Refusal to show id in Georgia (arrest)
• Man in Arizona arrested for refusing to surrender firearm to officers who refused to show their own ID

Wanted to post a clarification:
http://web.mit.edu/j-pal/www/book/Arsenic_InfantMortality_feb10.pdf

On the other end of the spectrum, the calculations by Lokuge et al. (2004) of the dis-
ease burden from arsenic exposure that take into account only "strong causal evidence" from
existing studies estimate that arsenic-related disease leads to the loss of 174,174 disability-
adjusted life years (DALYs) per year among the population exposed to arsenic concentrations
of more than 50 ppb, which amounts to 0.3% of the disease burden, compared with diarrheal
disease which accounts for between 7.2% and 12.1% of the total disease burden.

Since infant mortality results in a disproportionate DALY impact compared with adult morbidity and mortality, I suspect the percentage of DALY disease burden impact gets skewed, but overall I think my previous point stands.

A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.

Are you sure you're not mixing up two different stories here? Although trace amounts of Arsenic are common in aquifers that contact certain kinds of alluvial sediments, only a few areas have experienced really high concentrations. In particular, this has happened with shallow tube wells in India and Bangladesh. These types of wells were extremely cheap, and were drilled in the millions starting around the 1970's with UNICEF assistance; I am unaware of any similar large-scale occurrence of contamination in Africa.

On looking at the morbidity and mortality modeling from the WHO link, I wouldn't automatically label it an complete tragedy right away, either. The amount of Cancer and other diseases from arsenic contamination (chronic ingestion, the concentration is not the kind required for acute poisoning) is definitely non-trivial. However, following the implementation of the tube wells, infant mortality dropped by something like half (keeping in mind this that the high starting point of mortality means half of a fairly big number), with substantial reductions in prevalence of waterborne diseases. It is entirely possible that the number of lives (and maybe person-years of life) saved by the wells could outnumber those that were lost.

Actually, I strongly suspect that the person-years of life saved could be greatly more than the number lost, but I can't directly substantiate the possibility with numbers, except to say there is evidence that recent anti-arsenic campaigns have resulted in increases in infant mortality, due to avoidance or loss of well water leading to greater use of microbially contaminated water supplies.

Obviously, it would be great to have both clean water with no arsenic at all. Possible with deeper but more expensive wells that have been gradually replacing the older wells (it sounds like other strategies like filtration and rain-water storage have sustainability problems when implemented out in the field), but I doubt UNICEF or similar charitable organizations can get the money they need these days to replace them all at a sweep.

This is why it's so important to document your code. Once the compiler reads your comments it will understand your intent and decide whether you or your code is unstable.

What? Do you think a compiler reads human readable comments? Do you really know what a "compiler" is? From what you said, I highly doubt you know what this topic is all about.

Speaking of this article, to me, it is talking about a software (STACK http://css.csail.mit.edu/stack/ ) implemented by MIT researchers that could detect bugs from complied codes. These bugs are from optimization in compilers -- remove undefined behavior from the original code while compiling the code. As a result, the compiled code could have security holes.

The TFA links to the actual paper. Maybe you should read that.

Towards Optimization-Safe Systems:Analyzing the Impact of Undefined Behavior

struct tun_struct *tun = ...;
struct sock *sk = tun->sk;
if (!tun)
return POLLERR; /* write to address based on tun */

For example, when gcc first sees the dereference tun->sk, it concludes that the pointer tun must be non-null, because the C standard states that dereferencing a null pointer is undefined [24:6.5.3]. Since tun is non-null, gcc further determines that the null pointer check is unnecessary and eliminates the check, making a privilege escalation exploit possible that would not otherwise be.

"To understand unstable code, consider the pointer overflow check buf + len | buf shown in Figure 1 .. While this check appears to work with a flat address space, it fails on a segmented architecture" ref

Do you think most-all exploits are down to the defective x86 segmented memory architecture.

"Unstable" code is not a technical term used by any self-respecting programmer. Researchers love to make up terms that nobody but themselves use. Props to the MIT News article for correctly avoiding that term.

Is "free will" even a clearly defined concept?

No, it's not. The whole question is mis-asked. Raymond Smullyan's piece Is God A Taoist? has the best explanation I've seen:

Mortal:
What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!

God:
You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.

Mortal:
So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

God:
It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.

Actually, sounds more like LabView. Fishing through that programming environment's icon set for the correct function is very close to what I imagine hell must be like.

I suspect that it's pretty strongly dependent on implementation, with two main drivers: On the one hand, you have the needs of essentially-not-programmers-at-all, who have some input that needs to travel through a series of tubes and get transmogrified. The results aren't going to be pretty; but it's a legitimate need. (there are also those who argue that it's a good pedagogical approach for young children, as in classic Klick 'n Play(published by Maxis in the US, international publishing and titles are strangely all over the map, or the more recent Scratch.

On the other hand, "Flow-based programming" is essentially another flavor of Functional Programming, which seems likely to never truly die, no matter how obscure in real-world use, because of how central the concept of 'functions' in some reasonably generalized sense is to mathematics, ensuring a ready supply of people ready to charge into the breach and try to bring the elegance of pure mathematics to programming. Again.

The real article is here: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/madmec-design-competition-1017.html

(Damn slashdot editors allowing blog hyping instead of linking to the actual sources!!!)

Close reading of that indicates this is just a huge trick played on the body's temperature regulation system.
There is no actual heating or cooling of the body. Its probably dangerous at some level, and the body would
also probably "learn" to ignore it.

Once your follow the link from the self promoting blog to the actual article from MIT you find this

Over the course of developing its technology, the Wristify team made a key discovery: Human skin is very sensitive to minute, rapid changes in temperature, which affect the whole body. They found they needed to heat or cool any body part (in their case, the wrist) at a rate of at least 0.1 C per second in order to make the entire body, overall, feel several degrees warmer or colder.

After 15 prototypes, the team landed on its final product, which resembles a wristwatch and can be powered, for up to eight hours, by a lithium polymer battery. This prototype demonstrated a rate of change of up to 0.4 C per second.

The “watch” part of the prototype actually consists of the team’s custom copper-alloy-based heat sink (a component that lowers a device’s temperature by dissipating heat). Attached is an automated control system that manages the intensity and duration of the thermal pulses delivered to the heat sink. Integrated thermometers also measure external and body temperature to adjust accordingly.

Its clear from the article that there is no actual heating of the body involved. Their system does not have enough power to heat 150 pounds of (essentially) water even one degree in the time period mentioned, let alone maintain any elevated temperature over 8 hours.

They are simply tricking the body into thinking it is warm enough or cool enough so that you don't FEEL cold / hot. You still actually ARE too cold or too hot.

This sounds interesting but I wonder just how safe it is to trick the body's thermal regulation its cool enough such that it no longer pays attention to the fact that it might be running dangerously close to heat induced stroke? Or trick it into thinking its cold, so it ramps up the metabolism.

In fact this might be a more useful as w weight loss device than an energy saving device.
But I'm still not convinced we should let engineers start micromanaging bodily functions, when all they are worried about is the device and the energy consumption.

Technology to do the same thing was invented a LONG time ago. Its called a sweater.

Even cheaper is a simple cap. Put it on, and you reduce heat loss through your head sufficiently enough to actually warm your entire body. Take it off and the reverse happens. The cap will last for years with no need for environment polluting batteries, and never has to be plugged in or recharged.

Interesting stories. The correct link for part four is http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N19/dubai.html by the way.

How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers? Usually, these consultants are in their late 20s, got their MBA right after their undergrad years, never worked anything more complex than a retail job, and are immediately hired to dispense advice.

Strategic consultants aren't hired to provide answers, they are hired to provide "independent" "scientific" justification for those answers that your execs have already decided upon but don't want to be held responsible for.

I recommend you read the third part of this article series in which a young former consultant recounts his experience with BCG in Dubai:

Part I: The city of tomorrow

Part II: Welcome to your caste

Part III: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

Part IV: Dispatches from the collapse

How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers? Usually, these consultants are in their late 20s, got their MBA right after their undergrad years, never worked anything more complex than a retail job, and are immediately hired to dispense advice.

Strategic consultants aren't hired to provide answers, they are hired to provide "independent" "scientific" justification for those answers that your execs have already decided upon but don't want to be held responsible for.

I recommend you read the third part of this article series in which a young former consultant recounts his experience with BCG in Dubai:

Part I: The city of tomorrow

Part II: Welcome to your caste

Part III: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

Part IV: Dispatches from the collapse

How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers? Usually, these consultants are in their late 20s, got their MBA right after their undergrad years, never worked anything more complex than a retail job, and are immediately hired to dispense advice.

Strategic consultants aren't hired to provide answers, they are hired to provide "independent" "scientific" justification for those answers that your execs have already decided upon but don't want to be held responsible for.

I recommend you read the third part of this article series in which a young former consultant recounts his experience with BCG in Dubai:

Part I: The city of tomorrow

Part II: Welcome to your caste

Part III: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

Part IV: Dispatches from the collapse

How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers? Usually, these consultants are in their late 20s, got their MBA right after their undergrad years, never worked anything more complex than a retail job, and are immediately hired to dispense advice.

Strategic consultants aren't hired to provide answers, they are hired to provide "independent" "scientific" justification for those answers that your execs have already decided upon but don't want to be held responsible for.

I recommend you read the third part of this article series in which a young former consultant recounts his experience with BCG in Dubai:

Part I: The city of tomorrow

Part II: Welcome to your caste

Part III: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

Part IV: Dispatches from the collapse

Amateur and university groups have been doing this in the past. One group that I do think is impressive is this effort by Copenhagen Suborbitals, as they are motivated by real world constraints and the fact they are going to put this spacesuit around a person who actually will be in the vacuum of space.

While it is certainly a technology that needs to be developed in order to actually get into space, it is hardly the most important thing. If they were showing how to make spacesuits on the cheap (like the Copenhagen Suborbital example) or showing an alternative design that really pushes the concept of a spacesuit (like some of the "skin tight" examples I've seen that are more like a diving wet suit as opposed to a military aviation flight suit) I'd be more impressed. There are some very real challenges for building space suits, but it is also a well developed and tested engineering regime. About a thousand people have been into space so far, which has given plenty of practical tests and mountains of data to compare against including some problems that happened in terms of the assumptions people made with those suits that simply is incorrect.

It is nice that some people are thinking about these issue, but I hardly think this group in the main parent article is going really be setting any sort of standards for suit design.

The usual SciFi trope is that 'Maths is the Universal language', and data is just Maths. There are people investigating how to use incredibly simple encodings to build up meaningful messages which may be understood by advanced extraterrestrials. For example, CosmicOS is a 4-symbol lambda calculus which aims to do just this http://people.csail.mit.edu/paulfitz/cosmicos.shtml

There are even simpler encodings, like Binary Lambda Calculus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus and the more-verbose but conceptually-simpler Binary Combinatory Logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_combinatory_logic

References? What was the rate? Also perfectly healthy people have died after contracting measles, mumps or rubella.

There's also measurement uncertainty to consider (have a look at this introductory physics lecture if you haven't thought about such things before).

But it's a bit more subtle than that. In certain sense, it's easy to measure whether someone is alive or dead. And sometimes it's easy to say why they died (e.g. hit by a bus). But suppose some kid gets vaccinated and then gets sick and dies a few weeks later. Even if you happen to identify a particular causative pathogen - are you going to able to determine whether the infection happened in the clinic during vaccination. And what if the kid was already very fragile (e.g. with a severe inherited genetic condition). Do you blame the vaccine or the genetic condition or whatever other pathogens were present in the clinic?

Certainly it's true that the vast majority of people who get vaccinitated grow up to be normal (at least within the limits of our ability to measure normality). But, whenever I hear the claim that absolutely no one has ever died from being vaccinitated, I cringe a bit and think of measurement uncertainty (and also true Scotsman - just a bad batch of vaccine - no true vaccine would ever cause any problems).

See page 184 of the Unix Haters Handbook, http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf. That has to be the most obstinate bug in the world.

Helpful comments in the source code:

                if (wtype == w_eol)
                    {
                        if (*p2 != '\0') /* There's no need to be ivory-tower about this: check for
                                  one of the most common bugs found in makefiles... */
                            fatal (fstart, _("missing separator%s"),
                                          (cmd_prefix == '\t' && !strneq (line, " ", 8))
                                          ? "" : _(" (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?)"));
                        continue;
                    }

So they detect it, and they'd rather insult the user. But "no ivory tower", no no, we will just not parse a space when the ATT code only parsed tabs. It's a "makefile bug", not a "make bug". Sure.

And for the fun, I just tried to build make. On MacOSX, supposedly some kind of Unix that I head a few folks actually use to build stuff. Could be a prime citizen. OK, no configure out of the box with the git repository. OK. No makefile, obviously. No install script. Bogus information in the INSTALL that tells me to run nonexistent configure. Well, running the magic incantation, aclocal ; autoheader; automake ; autoconf. Still does not work, missing files like config/compile. Running automake --add-missing. Whatever. Still an error where it's looking for po/Makefile.in.in. Huh?

So to build make, I need not just make, but four other utilities and makefile input inputs? WTF?

Make alone was bad enough. But it was not good enough for portability, so autoconf was added. But it did not work so automake was added. But it did not work, so... And now at version 4.0, we have a system here you need half a dozen commands just to build the damn thing, and it still does not build out of the box. Seriously?

This whole archaic build system is doomed. Go cmake.

This doesn't light the way to radiation-free energy.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412

"Although there have been a few proposals for fusion reactors employing plasmas far out of thermodynamic equilibrium (such as migma and inertial-electrostatic confinement), there has never been a broad, systematic study of the entire possible range of such devices. This research fills that gap by deriving fundamental power limitations which apply to virtually any possible type of fusion reactor that uses a grossly nonequilibrium plasma. Two main categories of nonequilibrium plasmas are considered: (1) systems in which the electrons and/or fuel ions possess a significantly non-Maxwellian velocity distribution, and (2) systems in which at least two particle species, such as electrons and ions or two different species of fuel ions, are at radically different mean energies. These types of plasmas would be of particular interest for overcoming bremsstrahlung radiation losses from advanced aneutronic fuels (e.g. ^3He-^3He, p-^{11}B, and p- ^6Li) or for reducing the number of D-D side reactions in D-^3He plasmas. Analytical Fokker-Planck calculations are used to determine accurately the minimum recirculating power that must be extracted from undesirable regions of the plasma's phase space and reinjected into the proper regions of the phase space in order to counteract the effects of collisional scattering events and keep the plasma out of equilibrium. In virtually all cases, this minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power, so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies, reactors employing plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium will not be able to produce net power. Consequently, the advanced aneutronic fuels cannot generate net power in any foreseeable reactor operating either in or out of equilibrium."

You're shooting a beam of protons through a gas of fuel, this is about as far away from thermal equilibrium as you can get. Only a small proportion of protons will actually wind up fusing, the power it takes to generate those protons and shoot them into the fuel (or the power to take the ones that miss fuel ions and recirculate them to give them another pass through the fuel) will dwarf the power you get from the fusion reactions. In other words: big fat hairy deal. Fusion is easy. It's the extracting useful amounts of energy from it that's hard, and this process can't do that.

You can afford to pay $12 for a box of cereal. Be honest. You could do it.

Yep.

Why don't you?

Because $11.50 of any money I spent on that fundamentally unhealthy product would go to the 1% that use their money to corrupt my government.

I pay extra for fair-trade, organic, shade-grown coffee. I pay extra for services from mom & pop stores that offer workers benefits. I pay extra for pizzas and chicken sandwiches that do not support politically activist religious fanatics like the Catholics or Mormons. I pay extra for clothes made without slave labor. I pay extra for cars that emit less pollution.

Most Americans in the 99% are just like me. They are more than happy to spend extra for something that does good in their view. But they won't pay $12 for slave-labor cereal with profits going to slavers and nutball armageddonists, and for most people in the United States that's all they are being offered.

The market, fundamentally, is neither free nor fair; and you can't buy what's not on the shelves. The corporate-owned Federal Government is doing everything it can to wipe out anything that might benefit the little guys- they won't even let farmers sell fresh milk to people who want to buy it. Because those bold libertarian heroes are protecting you from germs, see?

Author page, with links - http://demontjoye.com/projects.html
Their video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1LgeQTO1A
The product page - http://openpds.media.mit.edu/

Well, Hal, if this is what it takes to let you sleep at night despite your and your school's part in Swartz's persecution, have at it. But I doubt too many people are buying it; at this late date pretty much everyone's mind is made up anyway.

Including Slashdotters', apparently. But since you're making this about Abelson rather than Swartz, here are a few facts about the man you're casually brushing off.

Abelson is an old Lisp hacker. He has a long history of standing up for Freedom, in the sense /. appreciates. He's on the Board of Directors of the FSF, and was in fact one of the directors at its founding. He has solidly been in support of David LaMacchia, bunnie Huang, and Keith Winstein.

He has not shied away from standing up for freedom of information, even if there are heavy legal consequences involved.

He also puts his money where his mouth is, releasing a number of his own works for free. Before ebooks were a thing, he made sure his book was available for free online. He helped get OpenCourseWare off the ground. Heck, he's released (under Creative Commons) video of some of his own lectures...from 1986.

He's an expert in the area (in addition to the above personal experience, he also teaches a course on Ethics and Law in the Electronic Frontier). He also spent six months investigating and writing a book-length report about the Swartz case, and MIT's response to it, in particular. The summary describes the report as MIT "clearing itself"--while the report details that MIT did nothing legally wrong, it also goes into the moral and ethical issues of MIT's response without reaching a bright-line conclusion.

So, with all of this as context, which is more likely:
-Abelson is trying to make Swartz look like a bad guy in order that he can "sleep at night", or
-The man with a long history of views and actions supporting freedom of information, with a background in ethics and law on computer-related issues, who quite possibly is the single individual who has done the most thinking about the details of the Swartz case and MIT's response to it (and certainly knows more about it and has thought more about it than any Slashdotter), honestly and genuinely thinks that Swartz was naive about the realities of the situation he got himself into....and maybe, just maybe, it might make sense to give at least a small amount of genuine, honest consideration to his views?

Well, Hal, if this is what it takes to let you sleep at night despite your and your school's part in Swartz's persecution, have at it. But I doubt too many people are buying it; at this late date pretty much everyone's mind is made up anyway.

Including Slashdotters', apparently. But since you're making this about Abelson rather than Swartz, here are a few facts about the man you're casually brushing off.

Abelson is an old Lisp hacker. He has a long history of standing up for Freedom, in the sense /. appreciates. He's on the Board of Directors of the FSF, and was in fact one of the directors at its founding. He has solidly been in support of David LaMacchia, bunnie Huang, and Keith Winstein.

He has not shied away from standing up for freedom of information, even if there are heavy legal consequences involved.

He also puts his money where his mouth is, releasing a number of his own works for free. Before ebooks were a thing, he made sure his book was available for free online. He helped get OpenCourseWare off the ground. Heck, he's released (under Creative Commons) video of some of his own lectures...from 1986.

He's an expert in the area (in addition to the above personal experience, he also teaches a course on Ethics and Law in the Electronic Frontier). He also spent six months investigating and writing a book-length report about the Swartz case, and MIT's response to it, in particular. The summary describes the report as MIT "clearing itself"--while the report details that MIT did nothing legally wrong, it also goes into the moral and ethical issues of MIT's response without reaching a bright-line conclusion.

So, with all of this as context, which is more likely:
-Abelson is trying to make Swartz look like a bad guy in order that he can "sleep at night", or
-The man with a long history of views and actions supporting freedom of information, with a background in ethics and law on computer-related issues, who quite possibly is the single individual who has done the most thinking about the details of the Swartz case and MIT's response to it (and certainly knows more about it and has thought more about it than any Slashdotter), honestly and genuinely thinks that Swartz was naive about the realities of the situation he got himself into....and maybe, just maybe, it might make sense to give at least a small amount of genuine, honest consideration to his views?

Well, Hal, if this is what it takes to let you sleep at night despite your and your school's part in Swartz's persecution, have at it. But I doubt too many people are buying it; at this late date pretty much everyone's mind is made up anyway.

Including Slashdotters', apparently. But since you're making this about Abelson rather than Swartz, here are a few facts about the man you're casually brushing off.

Abelson is an old Lisp hacker. He has a long history of standing up for Freedom, in the sense /. appreciates. He's on the Board of Directors of the FSF, and was in fact one of the directors at its founding. He has solidly been in support of David LaMacchia, bunnie Huang, and Keith Winstein.

He has not shied away from standing up for freedom of information, even if there are heavy legal consequences involved.

He also puts his money where his mouth is, releasing a number of his own works for free. Before ebooks were a thing, he made sure his book was available for free online. He helped get OpenCourseWare off the ground. Heck, he's released (under Creative Commons) video of some of his own lectures...from 1986.

He's an expert in the area (in addition to the above personal experience, he also teaches a course on Ethics and Law in the Electronic Frontier). He also spent six months investigating and writing a book-length report about the Swartz case, and MIT's response to it, in particular. The summary describes the report as MIT "clearing itself"--while the report details that MIT did nothing legally wrong, it also goes into the moral and ethical issues of MIT's response without reaching a bright-line conclusion.

So, with all of this as context, which is more likely:
-Abelson is trying to make Swartz look like a bad guy in order that he can "sleep at night", or
-The man with a long history of views and actions supporting freedom of information, with a background in ethics and law on computer-related issues, who quite possibly is the single individual who has done the most thinking about the details of the Swartz case and MIT's response to it (and certainly knows more about it and has thought more about it than any Slashdotter), honestly and genuinely thinks that Swartz was naive about the realities of the situation he got himself into....and maybe, just maybe, it might make sense to give at least a small amount of genuine, honest consideration to his views?

This one never gets old
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

My son started using Scratch when he was about 10.
He saw someone else using it at school and asked me to install it at home, then he basically taught himself to program simple games in it.

Lately, he has been creating mods for Minetest, again entirely on his own (researching the file format, reading the project Wiki, dissecting other user's Mods, etc)

I have a bunch of Python resources standing by for when he wants to take another step up.

Please check this out:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

This is a random paper generator, and its output has been accepted at a conference.
There are plenty of low-quality conferences and publications.

Hello! I see you are trying to create an array which is bigger than the RAM on your computer.

Is the array called make_prog_look_big?

Anonymity != Privacy because we're in the age of big data where large data sets can be cross-correlated to profile an individual. From stores that track your cell phone while you're shopping to big chain stores figuring out you're pregnant, big data techniques are invading your privacy in more and more ways. If you think that anonymous data collection is safe, it's still data collection and despite people's best efforts, we are of course creatures of habit and your repetitive habits allow people to build fingerprints about you. If you have enough data points, even anonymous data points, you can build a profile of an individual, their habits, their likes, their dislikes and where they go on the Internet. If you can take that profile and match it against an individual using other correlating data you've been identified. This has been proven for example in the 2007 Netflix prize competition where anonymous movie reviewers were tracked down. There's lots of examples on this and over the past few years, techniques have become much better at picking individuals out of anonymous data sets.
  More chilling is a study released this year showed that using in analyzing anonymous cell phone tracking data, 95% of 1.5 million individuals could be identified.

What this means that as long as companies are able to collect data about you, whether tagged or anonymous, you're still being tracked somewhere and that is no guarantee that your privacy is protected. What has to happen to provide privacy is to stop all of the tracking and I don't see companies nor governments giving up that mechanism anytime soon.

Why bother responding to an AC troll?

Because somebody with a lazy brain might believe you.

To everyone else (besides the AC): http://video.mit.edu/watch/the-role-of-new-technologies-in-a-sustainable-energy-economy-9193/

Back in 2006, Dan Nyocera did some math (see minute :14 in above link)

  Right now we (planet Earth humans) use 12.8 trillion watts.

In 2050 we project a need of 28 terawatts. 2050 = 9 billion people. To find 18 terawatts he looks for in the following sources:

Biomass: If we grow crops for biomass on the whole earth (no more food!) -> 7 terawatts And we would need cellulose and lignon enzymes, which we don't have!

Nuclear: We'd need 8000 new power plants to generate 8 terawatts. That's 1 new plant every 1.6 days for the next 45 years (starting back in 2006)

Wind: Put a windmill 10m above ground on the whole landmass of the earth -> 2 terawatts

Dam every river left to get 1 terawatt.

The only solution for the future is solar. The only question is how to capture it because the sun provides 800 terawatts on just the landmass of the earth.

So STFU.

We need new technologies, sure. But (as Prof Nyocera suggests) we ought to stop hunting for a cure for cancer, MS, Alzheimers, AIDS. Because all of those are not existential threats to humanity. The Energy-Climate problem may well be. That won't happen (even if it is what we *ought* to do, for maximum human survival) so get ready for (indirectly) choosing who's going to die. And choose how: disease, war, natural disasters.

I don't know, paper was generated by MIT, so it just may be legit http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

what UDP is for?

An example of an application that uses UDP is Mosh

http://mosh.mit.edu/

You can have various disconnections and reconnections (Since it's written by someone at MIT, say you're going in to the T @Davis and coming out at Kendall/MIT) and the connection with mosh looks like you never disconnected.

--
BMO

The (negative) effectiveness of tinfoil hats may surprise you
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/archives/gsb-msg00128.html

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.

If it was obviously a deliberate back door, sure. Which is why the clever hacker/government-agency would be a lot more subtle -- rather than a glaring "if (username == "backdoor") allowRootAccess();", they'd put a very subtle mistake into the code instead. If the mistake was detected, they could then simply say "oops, my bad", and it would be fixed for the next release, but other than that nobody would be any the wiser. Repeat as necessary, and the visible results might not look too different from what we actually have.

Do you turn your phone off when you drive your the car or go about your daily business? Unlikely.

If you leave your battery in your phone, even in the 'off' position, your phone is still on, still capable of receiving and sending, including E911. Just because the screen says it's been turned off, doesn't mean it's been turned off. Pull the battery out.

Soon though, that won't be enough, and your phone and other devices will be able to transmit their location, data, etc. without the need for a battery.

From the leftovers of app inventor as created by MIT you can still make perfectly happy fart button implementation.

The trouble with most of those graphical environments is mostly the same thing. You can create a nice 60% ready app in a minimal time. However the fine tuning and the doing of special things will require effort that equals hard code coding.

Check Scratch for an example of user interface of creating (in particular, for scripting) that could work pretty well in a tablet environment.

How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future?

Perhaps in the same way that VXA, for example, allows you to future-proof compressed archives?