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• Societal Factors. Such as women being discouraged from technical fields, mathematics, science and other "male" fields when they're children or in school.
  
• Masculine Environment. That is, a lot of computer related workplaces or college classes have mostly men, and therefore a tendency for there to be things that some women would find offensive (sexist or sexual humour or female pin-ups, for example). Also, men use sarcasm or insults to communicate more often that women, often leaving women feeling as if the environment is hostile even when it isn't really. Different interests (sports, for example) can also leave women feeling less socially included.
  
• Gender-biased language.
  
• Some attempts to encourage women into these sorts of fields actually backfire, for instance making it seem as if women are less capable and that's why they might need extra help. (This can be subtle and the exact same thing could be interepreted differently by two different people.)

Try the following:

http://www.ai.mit.edu/peopl e/ellens/Gender/pap/pap.html
http://tap.mills.edu/
http://slinky.scrye.com/~lej/women/
http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/c hick2/
http://www.linuxchix.org
... and no doubt many more.

I'm sick of this same thing coming up on slashdot every few weeks, too. Bookmark those sites, guys, and stop making the same old assumptions over and over.

Of course, this reminds me of a fake advertisement in a 1984-vintage computer magazine for the Micro Man-Frame. It featured Direct Retinal Graphics (DRG), an integrated keyboard (strapped to the guy's waist), and an easily stored battery back (don't ask.) Does anyone remember this?

A Ron Rivest paper

and a postscript document on deniable encryption by Canetti, Dwork, Noir and Ostrovsky.

Happy hacking!

A Ron Rivest paper

and a postscript document on deniable encryption by Canetti, Dwork, Noir and Ostrovsky.

Happy hacking!

Actually XML is a bit more general than S-exps in that it allows you to pass parameters, and specify that these parameters are optional, fixed, or have default values. Of course these can be simulated in LISP, but the ways XML handles them is cleaner.

There's no semantic difference between <foo bar="baz">quux</foo> and (foo (:bar "baz") "quux"). The differences are

• that the Lisp reader parses the second with literally zero work, whereas I have to write cruft with SAX or the XML DOM to parse the first,
• and once the data structure is there, I have all of the most powerful programming language ever invented to munge the s-exp, and I have the lowest common denominator DOM interface to munge the DOM tree.

I'm worried that my tone is too flaming, but it's hard to convey how much easier the s-exps were to use without sounding like a language bigot. :( (I bet Perl hackers feel the same way trying to convince people that Perl is a great improvement over shell scripts + awk.)

Also XML has something resembling a type system in its DTDs, which seems somehwat alien to the LISP mindset...

Not in my experience -- it was easier to check correctness in the Lisp version. A DTD isn't a real type system for XML documents, it's just a constraint on the shape of the document's tree-structure.

I literally took the cheesiest possible way to write my "Lisp Markup Language" tree-walker (recursive invocations of DESTRUCTURING-BIND, basically) and it automatically gave me the equivalent of validity-checking plus I was able to add the type-checking on the element content.

I got a stronger test of correctness than validity for free -- you'd need to use an XML schema to get as strong checking as I did, and you'd be doing a lot more work than my evening hack.

Fundamentally, the key idea behind XML is that it's better to systematically modify data structures than to randomly hack strings, and that a good way to do this is to use a string encoding format that makes it easy to convert from string->data and data->string. This is a good idea, and XML is a great improvement if you are used to the prevalent way of doing things.

In Lisp, tree structures are programs, so you use this whole powerful language focused around manipulating these interesting data structures. XML has very weak transformability in comparison. And since the point is to do things with the data beyond just admiring how nicely the tags (or parens) match up, this makes Lisp easier to manipulate than XML.

This obviously won't take the world by storm, but I do feel obligated to point it out in case there are people for whom how powerful a solution is is more important than how widely a solution is used is. (You should look at Curl for another much more extensive example of how powerful the Lisp-like approach to documents is.)

By association, we can assume (having never even used XML) that it is cool as well.

By this logic, one would assume that SGML is really, really, wicked cool, being the granddaddy superset.

Back in the day, I wrote all my term papers at The 'tute in Scribe, before TeX and LATeX came along... Scribe fizzled and is hardly remembered, but it apparently was a direct progenitor of SGML, which became the framework within which HTML and, more recently, XML were defined.

The XML gods have done a remarkable job of finding a delicate balance between the flexibility and completeness of SGML vs. the ease of understanding HTML.

I, for one, would love to see XML become a prominent technology. A project such as this, if it catches fire in the GNU/Linux marketplace, would be a nice proof-of-concept and could help move XML into prominence.

Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity

Their point is that no one company can build up a strong enough patent portfolio to defend itself.

there is a posting of official disparaging words, as published by the US Air Force.

I was suprised "Pickaninny" and "Jungle Bunny" weren't listed.

no "Wetback", "Beaner", "Slut"...I guess disparaging is a step down from vulgar or whatever.

I had a black friend in jr. high who would just laugh when you called him a nigger, he didn't care a bit. smart, musician. he thought rascism was a joke, and lived his life that way. great guy.

I have a couple of "hispanic" friends now who are the same way, if you try to say something about their heritage, they laugh and say "look, i'm a beaner! just call me that!" smart, friendly, happy. they don't go for pc stuff at all.

it's cultural -- I worked with a number of highly educated african and jamaican people, and they were as friendly, trustworthy, etc. as any other person I've worked with. But hey found american blacks (generally! there are many great ones!) hostile, stupid and frightening.

a lot of women are the same way, going through their entire life with a chip on their shoulder. it's so sad.

I think you picked a bad example there. I checked out the Wheel Barrow patent that you referenced, and it looks like this guy has come up with a clever and relatively non-obvious extension to the basic design of a Wheel Barrow, by adding the ability for the Barrow to essentially "kneel" for loading.

This doesn't counter the fact that there are quite a few bad patents being issued for computer software, covering very obvious techniques that have been in use for many years. And above and beyond this abuse of the system in place, there is the argument advanced (persuasively I think) in an LPF white paper, that shows that the economic and social benefits of patents on material invensions completely break down when applied to software because of the completely different ratio between production and design costs in producing a physical artifact and a software artifact.

I wrote a Hello World app once and I will freely distribute the source code.

Would that be GNU "hello"?

DON'T POST FROM WORK!!!

Or at least be very careful if you do. Proxy logs aren't the only way to find out what you post, they could be sniffing network traffic. Use a secure proxy (like this one) if you want to be anonymous (of course, they could have backdoored your system...).

Let me know how this sounds. We establish a proxy mesh, so that all unencrypted requests for controversial material hit the originating server from non-sensitive territory. We encrypt the connection from our browser to the proxy for untraceability.
SSL improves upon PGP/GPG for this purpose. If you are used to PGP terminology, read 'certificate' as 'public key', and 'certification authority' as 'someone the browser trusts.'

1. GPG/PGP is not a stream cipher. The proxy couldn't pass any part of the file on until it had received the whole thing. In contrast, a streaming cipher like SSL can work on data - and pass it along - as it flows in.
2. It is already in browsers. In Netscape 2+ and MSIE 3+, you even can add new Certificate Authorities; having Verisign sign your certificate is not strictly necessary, but still useful.
3. An implementation (with source) is available both inside and outside the United States. SSLeay is a freely available implementation of SSL.
4. It can handle other protocols. SSLeay has been used in a secure telnet application. See section 16.2 of the FAQ pointed at above for info; the link may fail due to spaces in the anchor name.

The Internet Junkbuster Proxy, Muffin and RabbIT are all filtering proxies, well-adapted to block PICS quickly. These could also anonymize well, to avoid signalling the browser locale to the webserver. Squid is adapted for speed and caching, but not-at-all for filtering; I doubt it has any hooks in the code for that.

Sure. It's totally feasible if you use the right hardware. I remember back when de Garis was just starting his CAM-brain stuff, he was using my old research group's hardware, the CAM-8 (which is probably where he got the "CAM" part of his project's name.) We did plenty of volumetric simulations on the CAM-8 with 2^24 sites in realtime, and that was back in 1994. Considering the tech advance since then, and that he's now using his own custom hardware, it sounds completely resonable.

The problem is, as least back when he was still collaborating with us, his stuff just didn't work very well, and his ideas were kinda flaky. (At least in the opinion of the MIT undergrad who worked in both groups.) But hopefully he's worked things out since then. I wish him the best of luck.

Aside: There's something to be said for spatially organized computation, such as the CAM-brain. Fundamentally, the physics that we use to do calculation constrains all interactions to be uniform and local. It's sometimes easy to forget when we're writing software (which seems very ethereal) that the actual computation is constrained by physical laws that really do impose limits on speed and efficiency. So any calculation that is spatially organized (such as most physical simulations) is inherently parallelizable (of course) especially for fine-grained hardware. (or SIMD machines)

Sure. It's totally feasible if you use the right hardware. I remember back when de Garis was just starting his CAM-brain stuff, he was using my old research group's hardware, the CAM-8 (which is probably where he got the "CAM" part of his project's name.) We did plenty of volumetric simulations on the CAM-8 with 2^24 sites in realtime, and that was back in 1994. Considering the tech advance since then, and that he's now using his own custom hardware, it sounds completely resonable.

The problem is, as least back when he was still collaborating with us, his stuff just didn't work very well, and his ideas were kinda flaky. (At least in the opinion of the MIT undergrad who worked in both groups.) But hopefully he's worked things out since then. I wish him the best of luck.

Aside: There's something to be said for spatially organized computation, such as the CAM-brain. Fundamentally, the physics that we use to do calculation constrains all interactions to be uniform and local. It's sometimes easy to forget when we're writing software (which seems very ethereal) that the actual computation is constrained by physical laws that really do impose limits on speed and efficiency. So any calculation that is spatially organized (such as most physical simulations) is inherently parallelizable (of course) especially for fine-grained hardware. (or SIMD machines)

The contrast between BSD and Linux is the contrast between the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Clearly, Linux development is more anarchic, and one might expect that BSD would have some temporary advantages because of that. However, Richard Gabriel wrote an interesting essay, Worse is Better, explaining why C and Unix had overtaken Lisp, etc. The title is somewhat facetious but the observation is a fine one. The key point (missed, I think, by Gabriel), is not that the weaknesses of C vs. Lisp contributed to its success, but that the "get it working, then get it right" nature, and the openness of C and Unix let it evolve and reach perfection faster than striving for absolute perfection right off would have.

Both approaches have a good deal of merit, and one is not more right than the other. However, I would suspect that Linux will advance at a faster rate than BSD. Perhaps not always in useful directions, perhaps not always doing the One Right Thing, but over time, it will get there.

800 people cheering your robot on when it does something violent, intelligent, and completely unplanned makes the work worth it...

I believe that precise definition (OS equals kernel-mode code) is used in _Operating Systems: Design and Implementation_, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

...although, in Modern Operating Systems, he uses a similar definition and then later discusses Amoeba, which does a lot of what he considers "operating system" stuff in servers, although I didn't see anything in a quick look that indicated whether all those servers ran in kernel mode or not. One might consider a server process with special privileges, with which unprivileged code communicates via messages as "privileged code" even if it doesn't run in kernel mode, though.

On the other hand, the MIT Exokernel is a small kernel that "concentrates solely on securely multiplexing the raw hardware", with "library operating systems" running in userland (but in the context of the process requesting services from the OS) implementing "traditional operating system abstractions" such as file systems and networking stacks.

I.e., the APIs of modern systems tend to be implemented with several layers of abstraction; the layer of abstraction that's implemented by code with special privileges often implements only a part of the API, and may not implement any of it directly. Even in a "traditional" UNIX-flavored system such as a Linux distribution, in which a lot of the API is implemented by kernel code (plus a system call stub wrapper), enough of the API isn't that credit is due the implementors of the rest of the API as well.

(Alas, I don't have my copy of Inside the AS/400 at work, so I can't check how much of OS/400 runs in kernel mode, but the system software on the AS/400 is another interesting piece of software, with an architecture fairly different from the "conventional" architecture one gets exposed to with UNIX-flavored systems, Windows OT, Windows NT, VMS, etc..)

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, perhaps the finest post-graduate school for mathematical and computer minds in the world, has a course that teaches its entering geniuses the most basic social skills -- often at a rudimentary level. MIT students wittily dub it "charm school."

"Entering"? Nope. "Wittily"? Sure. "Finest"? Oh, if you insist.

MIT kinda takes a sabbatical each January, and the students and faculty hold various activities to entertain each other over the month. People show movies, take intensive and concentrated language classes, hold game tournaments, and what have you; each department will sponsor dozens of events and students hold about twice as many on their own.

One of the traditional events is Charm School, an utterly tongue-in-cheek collection of booths in one of the main lobbies. I think its description can be found somewhere on this page. Two years ago, I think, Miss Manners was the guest of honor.

I'd chalk this whole topic up to more of that vague, unsubstantiated, grasping-at-straws quality of the article that others have already pointed out. Let's move on.

Pretty small footprint, apart from the (shared) SSL libs.

Here's a readme file describing how.

--Ryan

> (The site happens to be down now btw... foo.)

I think it moved. Try http://scwm.mit.edu instead

-dan

Do you mean something like scwm?

(The site happens to be down now btw... foo.)

There's already a robust and well-supported infrastrucure in place for the network storage and retrieval of PGP/GPG public keys with the existing public keyserver network. The most compelling feature of the keyserver network is that it promotes the web-of-trust model of key trust, allowing users to sign and update trusted keys. This means that the web of trust continues to spread and become ultimately more useful.

The collection of pgp keys is not static data and should not be treated as such. It's a corpulent, growing, interrelated lattice of identies and trust relationships that changes continuously.

A redundant, and static storage of public keys in slashdot is nice and geeky, but not as useful as the public key networks. Key storage will not be beneficial without update capabilities, and I think we all can agree that such function is well beyond the scope of the slashdot engine. There is already a tool in place which is nearly ubiquitious for retreiving public keys on the net -- let's support that and not try to re-invent the wheel.

Rather, I think what would be useful would be a way for slashdot users to store and display their PGP Fingerprint and Key ID. Not the key itself, but simply the unique fingerprint of the key.

This is, I think, much closer to the usage philosophies of the public keyserver system. In fact, with a more rigid entry format (i.e. a field for just the key ID), Rob could even code links to the public keyservers to retreive a users current key in a dynamic manner.

For instance, if there were a place in my profile to enter my key ID: 0xE43C5FC3 there could easily be a link in the header above my comments linking to a keyserver using the url: http://pgp5.ai.mit .edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE43C5FC3

Plus a line for verification of my fingerprint:
D50C 1ABB 0D80 CC78 2939 FBE4 B379 C4A5 E43C 5FC3
to add yet another datapoint in people's ability to evaluate whether the key 0xE43C5FC3 really belongs to me.

A much more useful solution, I think. It Still allows slashdot to further promote the use of encryption while not attempting to address problems which are already solved.

Having the User info box for your public keys is nice, but please, if you use PGP, use the key servers! That way automated PGP systems like "metamail" (which also supports GPG) can look up your key when you send email and even, if necessary, fetch other keys used to sign it. Ideally, do both. BAL's PGP Public Key Server is a good place to start - all the servers mirror each other's content, so any should work.
--

There is an interesting effort at MIT, and similar efforts elsewhere, to develop the flavor of software engineering that will be appropriate for these kinds of things. It stretches the imagination a bit: each dust mote will have a pretty small amount of memory available, but the whole cloud of them will have a large amount of memory taken together. So it's not inconceivable that a large cloud might run a large program, where each mote held only a small amount of the entire executable.

If you draw a space-time diagram, and imagine how information passes around as a program is running, you can quickly convince yourself that this would be an excellent architecture for large-scale simulations, like molecular modeling, weather prediction, economic modeling, finite element analysis, and so forth.

The great hope for making such computing clouds economical is fault tolerance. The programming model requires you to assume from the outset that you won't know the exact location or orientation of the neighboring motes with which you are communicating. It is a very small step to say that some percentage of the motes might not work (say, 10 or 15 percent). This means you can be very sloppy about some QA issues that, done well as is required with current systems, are very expensive. So 85% reliable dust motes may end up giving you many more MIPS for your computing dollar.

It ain't real nanotech, but it's worth doing. It will put computer science where it needs to be when real nanotech arrives.

There has been a movement in AI for a few years now called 'behaviourism', which started with a paper by Rodney Brooks advocating the building of robotic insects with simple 'behaviours' which interacted with each other to produce an apparent limited intelligence which could cope with the real world. Just thinking that the possibilities for building apparent intelligence into swarms of such robots - a 'hive mind' if you like - must be considerable. You wouldn't need super processing power in each robot if you could achieve good results through their interaction, but could churn out intelligent and semi-autonomous swarms with the 'mind' being apparent only when the dust is together.

Savant

TELL TURTLE 0 RIGHT 90

The wonderful thing about teaching programming to little kids is the way it offers instant gratification when they do something right, because they made something really real happen on the computer. Compare this to most other stuff kids have to sit through: they write down answers under the little line, and the only thing that happens if they're right is they get a checkmark on their paper. @Whee. Even the simplest computer programs encourage a child to engage in mental play and spontaneous experimentation that's either inappropriate or impossible in more traditional areas of education.

In my previous job, I got to do a little bit of programming instruction with early elementary school kids. Inspired by books like Mitchel Resnick's "Turtles, Termites, and Trafic Jams", I installed a flavor of Logo on the lab's Macs, and gave the students three lines of code to type in, which would summon a "turtle" (a programmable drawing tool that lies at the heart of Logo) and make it move up the screen a little, drawing a line behind it as it went. The first kid who typed it all in correctly and ran the program saw the results and cried, "My turtle pooped!!" The others, of course, instantly latched on to this agreeable metaphor, and only a moment passed before other children discovered that the length and angle of the poop (despite the fact they probably hadn't yet been taught what an 'angle' was!) changed in certain ways if they typed in bigger or smaller numbers than the ones I provided. And what happened if they added more turtles?

The class spontaneously broke down into a turtle-poop contest. And thus they all became hackers! Of a sort. :)

So, really, I support having wee ones learn programming not so they'll know how to code per se (though that certainly is a great benefit), but because it rewards them for thinking and creativity like no other 'ordinary' school activity can!

The wonderful thing about teaching programming to little kids is the way it offers instant gratification when they do something right, because they made something really real happen on the computer. Compare this to most other stuff kids have to sit through: they write down answers under the little line, and the only thing that happens if they're right is they get a checkmark on their paper. @Whee. Even the simplest computer programs encourage a child to engage in mental play and spontaneous experimentation that's either inappropriate or impossible in more traditional areas of education.

In my previous job, I got to do a little bit of programming instruction with early elementary school kids. Inspired by books like Mitchel Resnick's "Turtles, Termites, and Trafic Jams", I installed a flavor of Logo on the lab's Macs, and gave the students three lines of code to type in, which would summon a "turtle" (a programmable drawing tool that lies at the heart of Logo) and make it move up the screen a little, drawing a line behind it as it went. The first kid who typed it all in correctly and ran the program saw the results and cried, "My turtle pooped!!" The others, of course, instantly latched on to this agreeable metaphor, and only a moment passed before other children discovered that the length and angle of the poop (despite the fact they probably hadn't yet been taught what an 'angle' was!) changed in certain ways if they typed in bigger or smaller numbers than the ones I provided. And what happened if they added more turtles?

The class spontaneously broke down into a turtle-poop contest. And thus they all became hackers! Of a sort. :)

So, really, I support having wee ones learn programming not so they'll know how to code per se (though that certainly is a great benefit), but because it rewards them for thinking and creativity like no other 'ordinary' school activity can!

Free Software licenses are a sort of nomic aikido, using features of copyright law to forcibly simulate a world in which copyrights simply aren't available. The abolition of copyright on computer programs is part of the FSF's stated goal. The founders have also been very vocal about opposing software patents, and they're hardly alone in that. I don't know of any stance they hold on trademarks, beyond a basic expectation of honesty.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

As for being a US citizen and coding outside the US it appears to have been done relating to at least one ssh product. TTSSH is a free SSH client for Windows. It is implemented as an extension DLL for Teraterm Pro by Robert O'Callahan roc+tt@cs.cmu.edu

Although the last update was Dec 98 so it is possible that he is now in jail.

excerpt:
"November 3, 1998: A lot of people have been asking me when TTSSH will support SSH 2.x. Unfortunately SSH 2.x is a very big, complex protocol and looks a lot of work to implement from scratch. Also, it looks like it will be hard to integrate all its features into Teraterm without significantly modifying the design of the main Teraterm application. There's no way I'll have enough time overseas in the foreseeable future to undertake this project, sorry. I hope there are other people with more time and freedom... "

That seems to indicate that the work was done outside the US.

As for other forms of export, I would guess that you could always do what was done by theEFF or with PGP.
Remember it is only the electronic export of crypto that is the problem.

there's a typo in the link to GALib. the proper link is http://lancet.mit.edu/ga

In my wanderings around the Web I haven't found a better resource than The Genetic Programming Notebook. It is by far the most comprehensive site I've found. Here you will find everything. The three main topics are:

• Genetic Programming
• Genetic Algorithms
• Artificial Intelligence, including A. Life.

These are very interesting fields which are really coming into their own with the advent of Linux and free software.

Experimenting with these techniques is as easy as downloading an existing library. One of the best is GALib, a library of C++ Genetic Algorithm objects.

Have fun.

Last year I got to take a course at RPI in GA's, where we used the Mitchell book. It is a great introduction to the field. We had several practial and fun programming assignments using GALib, a very complete C++ library implementing almost everything described in Mitchel's book. If you're looking for what else is happening in the field, in particular evolutionary computation, I would suggest John Holland's From Chaos To Order.

Which I still don't understand. I can't see how any of this is the US's fault. On the contrary, we should be grateful for the support we have received from organisations like the EFF and individuals like cananian (great site). Even RMS spoke up about this to the local media when he was here recently.

No; this is a typical product of Australian complacency. The government needed an extra vote to get their tax legislation through, so they bribed that Catholic idiot Harradine with this censorship legislation; not enough of the population knew enough to care, and too few of those who did cared enough to protest (kudos to you for being an exception, BTW); EFA was left in an isolated position, being actually taunted by the government for being politically naive and ineffectual; and now the IIA and the EFA have decided to play the government's deceitful little game as the best of a bad lot.

Mea culpa, too, by the way; my initial reaction to the legislation was "well, what can I do about it?". But I'm damned if I'm going to let some filtering software manufacturer censor my internet viewing, and I'm also damned if I'm going to pretend that I'm doing so (he says, still wondering "well, what can I do about it?").

Yes. My software is already GPLed. Write me and I'll send you a copy of it.

I'd personally love to be banned. It would be such a charming thing to tell guests...

I believe you are free to make the ISP server-filter for you. Then you can just bypass the filter.

I yelled about it, the cypherpunks ranted about it, everyone with an interest in privacy and politics mourned on the day it was passed. I wrote revelant software and wrote to cypherpunks-australia offering to help find US proxies for every citizen in .au to use. We were making noise.... you just weren't listening, that's all.

(Yes, I'm beating my own drum here, but I think it's a valid, if suboptimal, solution. And I'm going to need lots of mirrors if every single enlightened person in .au starts hitting my machine.)

See https://lm.lcs.mit.edu. I can't help but think that solutions are possible via technical means. Technology's problems are often technology's to fix.

Nah, just make them server-side filter you, and
then use this.

...and made as much noise as I could.
Moreover, I provided this.

Secure proxies (https://lm.lcs.mit.edu).

Seriously, there are possible sources for human-powered wearable computing.

who needs it, all I want is a modern incarnation of The Handy Board. I have a really cool Lego project in mind...
--

The spirit of Free software says that if you want to build a better mousetrap, shut the fuck up and build it.

Sure. Then when the patent holder comes beating upon your door and oh-so-politely informs you that your mousetrap has violated such-and-such patents, you can just hand over your firstborn son.

You've missed the point with patents. The reason everyone is so upset with Unisys and other software patent holders is that we can't build our mousetraps any more.

What a patent does is not very well understood by the average person, even the average technical person. Unlike a copyright (which covers the expression of an idea) a patent gives the holder total and unlimited control over an idea. If you use that idea to write a program, you're violating the patent. Even if you come up with the idea independently you're violating the patent.

Any program that creates an LZW-compressed GIF file is in violation of the Unisys patent. Unless it's licensed. That means that there's no way you can create GIF files with free software without violating the patent, at least if Roblimo's interpretation of this Unisys PR guy is correct. (1: Free software must be free for commercial use. 2: Unisys will not give free licenses for LZW "technology" for commercial use. Ergo 3: Free software cannot use LZW "technology", and 4: Free software cannot produce LZW-compressed GIF images. QED.)

So, while I'm not one of the ones who blasted Unisys in e-mail, I do understand and support the position (albeit not the tactics) of those who did the blasting. There is a reason for it, which you'd do well to research. I suggest The League for Programming Freedom as a starting point.

According to MIT's Graduate Admissions Page, "an applicant must have received a Bachelor's degree or its equivalent from a college, university, or technical school of acceptable standing." Another place to contact is MIT's Internation Student Office. If English is not your primary language will almost certainly need to take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foriegn Language). If you are asking about undergraduate admission you should be aware that financial aid for ugrad foreign students is almost unheard of in the US. I would say that any international (non-american) student would have a better-than-average chance of getting accepted to a US school since "diversity" has now become quantizable statistic used to rank US schools.