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Games programming. Seems to get and retain a good level of interest -- look how much stickability http://scratch.mit.edu/ has got. Of course, it's a whole new ballgame and a learning curve for you too if your background is enterprise Java.

MIT's scratch is pretty fun:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

What, you think someone smart enough to design a mission to intercept an asteroid with an impactor and hit that crater with a nuke wouldn't know to take the spin into account?

I used to think that someone smart enough to land a space craft on Mars could figure out how to convert to and from metric units, test their own code, and not spend several weeks ignoring critical warnings. So I have been wrong before.

OK, so there is a game called A Slower Speed of Light...
How about linking to it?

By the way, you may want to check out the recommendations of this group at MIT, who have produced traffic models that seem to fit well with real world data.

Their recommendations? Drive a little more slowly in heavier traffic and leave a little more space in front to give you room to react.

For a long lasting "alternative" college program, with independent study and student-directed programs, see:
    http://esg.mit.edu/about-esg/history
And check out the link at the bottom, "My Years in the MIT Experimental Study Group: Some Old Facts and New Myths," written by George Valley in 1974,
    http://esg.mit.edu/about-esg/George%20Valley%20History%20of%20ESG.pdf

I was lucky enough to find ESG after flunking out my first term at MIT... Made all the difference.

For a long lasting "alternative" college program, with independent study and student-directed programs, see:
    http://esg.mit.edu/about-esg/history
And check out the link at the bottom, "My Years in the MIT Experimental Study Group: Some Old Facts and New Myths," written by George Valley in 1974,
    http://esg.mit.edu/about-esg/George%20Valley%20History%20of%20ESG.pdf

I was lucky enough to find ESG after flunking out my first term at MIT... Made all the difference.

re: can't even pronounce Diffie-Hellman, let alone know what it is.
.
I don't give a Whitfield Diffie, let alone know what it is!
;>)
Listen, I'll get back to you in a Diffie with some of that mayonnaise. We call that East Coast Hellman's stuff "Best Foods" out here on the West Coast. That's what all that EastCoast-WestCoast fighting's all about, right?
.
That's a possibility for another /. poll: your favorite non-SI units:
-- Diffie as time
-- Smoot as length
-- I don't give a Whitfield Diffie as a curse/swear
-- pinch as volume
etc.

Some responses (informed by the actual paper):

The second DB doesn't have any of the the password hashes, it just knows which one is correct. It's a single table of (userid, hashid) where hashid is just some small integer.

The idea seems to be that the second system can be a smaller, less complicated single-function server, easier to harden and could be running a different OS/Webserver/DB stack. You could (by sacrificing real-time validation) even have the second system entirely firewalled off and unreachable to an attacker, just polling the login servers to validate the sessions at some small interval.

If the second system goes down, one approach would be to just accept any of the passwords until it comes back up. Then check the logs of what happened while it was offline and act accordingly (invalidate sessions, raise alarms, whatever).

Overall, I like the idea tremendously. It seems like it's not quite all there yet, but we're probably going to start implementing some variant of it immediately.

The end-to-end principle has to do with where network logic is placed, not which devices are reachable, routeable, or have an IP address. As simply as possible, the end-to-end principle means that we should have smart end hosts and a dumb network. This is why routers don't guarantee packet delivery -- its up to the hosts (with TCP, et al.) to ensure this. This is in contrast to telephony networks, where the network is responsible for almost everything.

There are good reasons to oppose CGNAT, but the "end to end principle" is not one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
or, if you're inclined to primary sources:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/End-to-End%20Arguments%20in%20System%20Design.pdf

Almost all States have a "Keep Right Except To Pass" law. You're breaking the law by sitting in the left lane and traveling at or below the speed limit, in the vast majority of the US.

Moving to solar will likely mean moving to less of a 24/7 economy. We'll have to cut back on nighttime activity. We'll have some nighttime power from wind so the world won't go completely dark at night. As for energy for home heating, storage is a solvable problem. Put a bank of rocks under your house, heat them during the day when energy is available, and use the stored heat to keep the house warm at night. Another energy storage technology - carbon nanotube ultracapacitors - is under development and could solve many of these problems. A device with the energy density of lithium ion batteries but with a lifetime of MILLIONS of charge cycles... if it can be produced at a reasonable price it would eliminate most of the objections to electric vehicles. Reference: http://web.mit.edu/erc/spotlights/ultracapacitor.html

No problem!

Here is the PDF pieces of CARDIAC:
http://web.mit.edu/kmill/www/hardware/hardware.html

Additionally, you can purchase an original kit for $15 from:
http://www.scientificsonline.com/cardiac-illustrated-computation-aid.html

I still have mine on a bookshelf at home. It was an amazing little kit to me when I was 15, and still no less impressive today.

Enjoy!

So you say stop playing politics, but then in the same argument you propose changing the law. Wait, what is the career title of somebody who changes the law? Somebody help me here, I don't recall...

Anyways: No, you're dead wrong on the 100 hours figure. Technology has actually permitted longer working hours than we used to do naturally, both in terms of time of day (artificial lighting) and seasons (most people used to be farmers). The period of the industrial revolution is probably the most we worked, because that is about the time when technology permitted the most work, and simultaneously required the most manual labor for extended periods. Yet during that time, we only worked about 60 hours a week:

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us

Pre-industrial times saw shorter work weeks than now:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

In-coincidentally, this is about the same time of the rise of communism. I think that mainly came about because people didn't like working as much as they did for as little as they got, which was unprecedented. Technology remedied that problem; not politicians. Communism only made things worse.

(And yes, I know that isn't a word, I just like the feel of it though.)

History has shown us repeatedly that legislating a reduction in working hours only makes the unemployment problem worse. France is the best recent example of that. People like you assume that the demand for labor is inelastic. You couldn't be more wrong, and history has demonstrated that quite decisively.

The worst that could happen is that the demand for labor goes low enough that people find their own way of acquiring the resources that they want, which would include things like starting smaller businesses. People like you don't realize this and make knee-jerk votes towards politicians who claim to have answers, and that results in situations like the one France is in now.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/

Dammit, the link didn't show up.

here it is: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-075-advanced-calculus-for-engineers-fall-2004/exams/

Now these aren't the best visual languages but they're two I learned. Logo and Turing:
Logo: http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/logo/programming.html
Turing: http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/

I found them pretty good back in the day.

Have a look at http://education.mit.edu/projects/starlogo-tng
It's available in English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Greek - so it should be localizable - certainly for latin-based languages.
I'm unaffiliated..

There are many localized version of Scratch available already, including Dutch.
If the localization is incomplete, I understand that Scratch is easily localizable.
http://scratchweb.nl/
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=81477

It's very easy to switch the locale in Scratch even while running scratch. Click on the left-most icon (a wire-frame globe icon) at the top-left, and that will allow you to select the language to use.
:>)
Danish a.k.a. Dansk, is already a supported language in Scratch, as are 49 other languages as shown at http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Languages

Available Scratch languages

Help translate Scratch into other languages.

Available Scratch languages

Help translate Scratch into other languages.

Schmidt is remarkably technical for a CEO (former Sun CTO with a T) which is really rare.

Yes, he is.

Note that multi-party systems can work fine elsewhere.

Yes, in elsewheres that have different balloting techniques.

I'm a great fan of Approval voting, myself. But there are numerous better methods than simple plurality.

So even though this'll get plenty of knee-jerk reactions for reasons that are inscrutable to me, I'd suggest direct representational voting, or some other way to stop gerrymandering being possible, or useful.

Gerrymandering is worse than merely an accidentally bad system-- it represents deliberate attempts to subvert democracy

The system was indubitably pretty neat back when

Or at least, was pretty good for a first try.

, but hasn't scaled well. Take the ingredient principles and build something that fits the current (and future, for say 50..100 years--investigating your voting system every century for effectiveness and possible revision isn't bad) situation better. In general, some system that doesn't happen to have a two-party-only implicit system property...

It's not that there's no inflation, it's that it's very low. Like historic lows. Certain goods have had spikes, mostly due to competition with the emerging world and due to diversion of food to fuel stupidity. Higher inflation would be a _good_ thing because real inflation requires wage inflation, but doesn't inflate the amount you owe in your debts. Inflation is something you should put into calculations when getting a mortgage. If your mortgage takes 30% of your salary now, and there's 5% inflation (but low interest rates like we have now) you'd be crazy to get a 15 year instead of a 30 year. The dollars that you use to pay off the second 15 years would be worth much much less to you than they are now.

You don't have to trust what the Fed tells you: http://bpp.mit.edu/ and http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/billion-price-update-2/

The rich, the "rentiers" are the people who cry foul about inflation. People working for a living shouldn't, it raises their wages and ameliorates their debts.

Medusa: Fuck you, cunt. Go suck another dick.
  Rick James:Yeah, fuck you, cunt. Go suck another dick.
  MedusaI'm a very kinky giiiirrrrllll. The kind you don't take home to motha!!!

Medusa: Fuck you, cunt. Go suck another dick.
  Rick James:Yeah, fuck you, cunt. Go suck another dick.
  MedusaI'm a very kinky giiiirrrrllll. The kind you don't take home to motha!!!

Um... yeah. No. I appreciate that what you have are considerably better than regular caps, but they're nowhere *near* the performance of what we keep being offered. Nanotube infused designs with power to weight ratios around that of batteries, graphene designs, etc. There's a huge wealth of applications waiting for them to hit somewhere around those marks. Electric cars, actual car battery replacements, cellphone power supplies that never die, backup systems for the house with peak powers far in excess of anything we have now but with comparable storage... the ultracap "breakthroughs" are as regular as any other kind (memristors, etc.) and the consistent no-show of actual commercially available units is also consistent. It's the flying car of electronic components, sigh. High voltage, high capacity, high vapor factor, lol.

Believe me, I've been following the whole ultracap thing for a while. I even keep an eye on EEStor, which I can assure you has been a stupendous exercise in fruitless waiting. As a ham with a full boat of offline powered goodies and the beginnings of a household able to run off backup systems, and more than a little willingness to buy an electric car, actual availability of ultracaps in what I call "the battery range" would truly light me up.

But that carrot is well and truly still out on the stick.

MIT aggregates about a billion prices and comes out with pretty much the same number as the CPI, which has recently been around 2%.

http://bpp.mit.edu/

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/billion-prices-project.html

MIT aggregates about a billion prices and comes out with pretty much the same number as the CPI, which has recently been around 2%.

http://bpp.mit.edu/

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/billion-prices-project.html

http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/

Go away and spread FUD about inflation elsewhere. You're wrong.

But the idea is the fare market value of the TV could easily be $80. Having heard "Not 300...150" those are your anchors/comparisons, but do they have anything to do with the true value of the item? A study shows even considering unrelated numbers (last 2 digits of your own social security #) before making an evaluation will impact what value people assign to goods: http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Chapters/CA.pdf

Don't get your knickers in a bunch. This is done for the greater good of science.

MIT has a Wright Brothers Wind-Tunnel, funded in part by... Curtiss-Wright, the airplane company partly founded by the Wright Brothers. It was created to promote the development of aerospace. Not to cover up the failings of the aerospace industry. When you create as much impact on an industry as a Ford, a Wright, or and RSA, you can give back to society and expect a bit of advertising in perpetuity in return. They're already immortals.

A 4.0 from MIT might help when securing an interview for Google but most places are more concerned about your ability to reliably deliver. [...]

As an aside, MIT has a 5.0 scale, not a 4.0 one: http://web.mit.edu/registrar/gpacalc.html

Well... I think it had a lot more to do with NASA knowing that they'd never get the Nixon White House and OMB to sign off on it unless the Air Force was involved, giving the Shuttle a customer. But the Air Force wanted those stupid polar launches from VAFB to put up spy satellites on almost no notice, so that meant a big cargo bay, greater cross range, and the other various compromises that led to the crappy Shuttle we got.

If you haven't read it, Jenkins' Space Shuttle book is the definitive resource. (Sadly the most recent edition ends slightly before the Columbia accident; I assume a final edition is in the works) Also there are some hella good classroom lecture videos from an MIT course on the Shuttle, which featured guest speakers from NASA such as Chris Kraft. You can see them here: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/video-lectures/

If it was open source, you'd have more people looking at the code.

That's the theory. I like to think it actually works, but it's been a long time since I looked at kernel code.

If it was closed source ...

I can't even begin to care about people who use closed stuff. Perhaps it's a good thing that it even exists, so my ("moran") sister and Mom can use crypto (once they finally learn that crypto even exists and is needed), but it's hardly an optimal solution considering the black hats out there actively trying to pants us all (DoJ, DHS, TSA, ICE, AT&T, SCOTUS, I'm talking about you).

Now, I guess I'll be off to Gitmo.

X-PGP-Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x48EE77B1AC94E4B7

I just bought my kids a Scratch programming book (Super Programming Adventure or something). Hope it's good!

Scratch is a great language, and a far better choice for beginners than Java. Your kids will have fun, and be able to see real results the first day. I started my kids with Logo, which is great for a start, but they soon got bored, so I showed them how to use Scratch.

Teaching Java to high-schoolers as a first language is inappropriate. The learning curve is way too steep.

Academic journals typically have an editor or group of editors who work for little or no pay. These editors decide whether a submission should proceed to peer review, select the reviewers, and oversee the communication between the reviewers and the submitting authors. Academics do this work for free because it is considered to be part of the vocation of creating and expanding knowledge. Publishers were necessary in the past because they handled the logistics of typesetting and printing and distributing the material, but now authors are able to typeset their own papers and distribute them through the internet.

The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) exempifies this change. Much of the editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal collectively resigned to form JMLR as an open-access journal. The new journal had all of the prestige and experience that the old one used to have, with virtually none of the costs, and is doing just fine.

Take a look at studies and analyses comparing the physical location of team members to the amount of communication between them and then you really understand my she made this change at Yahoo:
MIT business school course pdf1
MIT business school course pdf2

Take a look at studies and analyses comparing the physical location of team members to the amount of communication between them and then you really understand my she made this change at Yahoo:
MIT business school course pdf1
MIT business school course pdf2

It's started happening in some areas. It's easiest in fields (like mine) where it's already standard for researchers to provide publication-ready final PDFs, usually typeset with LaTeX using a template provided by the journal. In that case, the publisher is not adding much value: they are just shuffling PDFs around, and as academics we are already quite capable of shuffling around our own PDFs.

JMLR, which has displaced Machine Learning to be the top machine-learning journal within only a few years after the latter's editorial board resigned to form it, is one of the success stories.

One goal does not need to interfere with the other. Emacs Lisp and Scheme are trivial to learn. Scheme is a more of a general purpose programming language. It's trivial to learn (see HERE)It's also worth learning simply because one of the best CS books, the SICP, is using Scheme. As for Emacs Lisp, I don't see a need to get very deeply into. Scheme is nicer and more simple. Emacs Lisp is the language much of emacs is written in as well as its modules. Unless you have in mind writing Emacs modules, picking up elisp from Emacs's built in tutorial is more than enough for hacking your personal .emacs file. (however, coding a text editor in elisp sure kicks the ass of using Cs for that)

I honestly, don't know why Scheme hasn't picked up steam in the mainstream. Yes, we know people don't like the aesthetics of s-expressions, but other than that it's a fantastic programming language. It has the nicest cleanest implementation of lexical scope and closures I have seen so far, dead simple syntax (you can write a minimal scheme interpreter in Python or Scheme in 100-200 lines), first class functions, higher order functions, dynamic memory management, powerful lambda expressions (this is to name just a few features). In fact, Scheme had things 20 years ago that other programming languages are still copying from it.

I've been taking online courses for two years(*), and my conclusion is: it's not the subject, it's the presentation.

I've come to the realization that college professors - even highly esteemed professors from highly esteemed universities - don't know much about the actual technique of teaching, nor of presentation.

Every course I've seen so far goes against the grain of how we learn, or has features which repel attention. Droning talk with hypnotic rhythm, no vocal variety, poor spacing and timing, and filled with pauses and disfluencies which put the student to sleep (Daphne Koller, Stanford). Tedious derivations with no initial apparent purpose and no apparent endpoint which go on and on, suddenly ending with simple result (Anant Agarwal, MIT). Pointless exercise and homework with no apparent relevance to the subject (Richard Buckland, UNSW). The list is endless.

People who give lectures for a living - public speakers, professional salesmen, life coaches, and so on - have this figured out. They *have* to, because their livelihood depends on it. Their presentation has to capture interest, have relevance, have value to the listener, and be easily understood.

College professors sing to a captive audience with no feedback. If students don't do well, it's because of the course content; or it's because the students are not "Stanford level" or whatever. Stanford is considered tough, but no one ever wonders whether it's because the quality of teaching is low. Colleges aren't rated highly when they can teach anyone, they are rated highly when they can only teach the top students.

The typical online course just videotapes a lecture and throws it up on the net with some homework and grading software. There is no rehearsal, no redoing of bloopers or flubs, nothing one would get in a professionally-made video. The homework is generally "one question per concept" and is often "get it right the first time". No room for experimentation, multiple practice, or exploration. No feedback or watching the professor run through an example.

They wonder why the attrition rate is so low, it's obvious.

It's because their methods are just bloody awful.

(Note: I've scored high 90's in each course so far. The material isn't that tough, if you've ever had a good professor you know how understanding is easy when well presented. Blaming the content or the student is a dodge - very little is difficult to understand if it is taught well.)

Airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.

The Traffic Collision Avoidance System uses transponders of a particular type: they communicate with one another to determine mutual range (from round-trip signal times), azimuth (by using directional antennas) and altitude (as reported by the transponders). TCAS is mandatory for all but small airliners in most of the world, and the military use it when they are not in combat.

http://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol02_no3/2.3.7.TCAS.pdf

mille, as long as Hasbro doesn't kill it (I presume that's why there's no "bornes" in the name). At one point, it was one of my favorite toys for "compiling!" xmille (and the accompanying README) if you want a GUI.

... sort of. And it is established physics. See Swimming in Spacetime: Motion by Cyclic Changes in Body Shape, Science, 2/27/2003, by Jack Wisdom.

But this mechanism relies on general relativistic effects, and only works in curved spacetime. Momentum conservation is not violated, because while the location of the object changes, its momentum (thus velocity) does not -- it simply cyclicly translates itself through space.

My first thought reading about the EmDrive was that Shaywer had found a way to reproduce this effect using a microwave cavity. But unless I'm mistaken, this does not appear to be the case, and I don't follow the arguments that Shaywer's drive should work.

Starting off with the Google's Python Class, https://developers.google.com/edu/python/ , looking for "online course python programming" is the fastest and fun way to get a grip on what programming is.

For the serious and the bitten, a free and open course aimed at students with little or no prior programming experience:
Guttag, John. 6.00SC Introduction to Computer Science and Programming,Spring 2011. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare), http://ocw.mit.edu/ (Accessed 07 Feb, 2013). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

To go beyond syntax and algorithms, expose yourself to elegant open source python code and libraries

Get through half and you are a better programmer than most. https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

+1

Tell him to write a game. One per week would be a good start. It doesn't have to be releasable, just written. Something simple, like tic tac toe, or solitaire would be a start. Then progress to things that require collision detection and crude 2d physics and animation.

For good graphics, learn OpenGL.
There's a massive quantity of tutorials at NeHe Productions.
With OpenGL being used on tablets and web interfaces, it's the way to get an edge.

For bad graphics, take a look at Dwarf Fortress.
Even with text-only graphics that game brings in tens of thousands per year.

Read Programming Pearls and Beautiful Code for unique ideas for approaching a problem. Take a look at the Fast Inverse Square Root for a good example of combining bit-level hacking with Calculus.

Nvidia made the GPU Gems series available online. It has advanced concepts, but is currently down. Subsurface scattering is an amazing effect, as is Navier-Stokes simulations.

MIT has a course on algorithms with video lectures.

If none of that piques his interest, then he shouldn't be a programmer.

There was an article earlier about Tensor Displays (slashdot link), (MIT link), which used a sandwich of three high-refresh-rate LCD screens to simulate a light field by using the screens to selectively block light in multiple directions.