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Was hoping for something more like this: http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/

'Internetworking' predated Ethernet by a long shot. One could argue that the UUCP network was the progenitor to or perhaps the first incarnation of the Internet - it had file transfers, email, usenet news, and was a loosely-managed, cooperative network of systems across companies, universities, and government. It was mostly modem-based; those with dedicated leased lines were the envy of all.

It was store-and-forward, explicitly routed, and relied on config files like this. Contained within this example is my UUCP node definition from 22 years ago. I'm not tellin' which one.

Speaking of ethernet, anyone else remember thick ethernet cable and vampire taps?

Similar work is being done at MIT.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/transparent-solar-windows-0415.html

For the folks wondering what 70% transparent windows look like, I think the small glass pictured in that article is 65% transparent. Certainly good enough for ambient lighting in an office.

I don't know if anyone has been keeping track, but there's this thing called the internet where you can get a really good education for free. Tablets will give children access to this internet.

We currently have four major players in this arena:

• Khan academy, for high-school up through 1st year college
• Coursera, college level
• MITx/edx, college level
• Udacity, college level

This is in addition to all the universities which are putting lecture videos online, along with course materials and (in a few cases) the textbook content. Oh, and youtube videos of lectures, and the zillion-and-one websites explaining whichever subject you're interested in. Google "relativity" or "tensors" sometime - see if you can find an explanation that works for you.

An experiment in India has shown that when you give uneducated, poor children access to an internet-connected computer they figure things out on their own. Complex, interesting, and difficult things that you might not expect an ignorant user to manage. (Such as typing a thank-you note without access to a keyboard.)

This is all you need, kids will figure things out for themselves. Having a teacher to nudge them in the right direction, or help them over a difficult part is just gravy.

Kids are voracious learners, and have always been. Abe Lincoln used to sit at home practicing his "ciphering" (arithmetic) by drawing numbers on a shovel with charcoal. Over and over, until he got comfortable with the math. All kids do this - it's in the nature of growing up.

Just giving kids access to material will be a huge leap over the current situation. Schools and teachers are extra.

With a divorce rate around 50% I agree that most marriages are not happy. I say most because if half end in divorce I'll wager that at least 'some' marriages continue unhappily. Half plus some is most*.

*For some values of most.

This "reasonable request" is like a request to paint a cardboard house in a prettier color. Sure, it'll be an improvement, but it's still useless in most climates.

Current iteration of 3D cinema uses only single channel to pass depth information, difference between left and right image. Actual 3D perception involves this plus focus/convergence distance and parallax. Lack of parallax is what killed this for me - I can watch 3D while sitting perfectly still, but whenever I move and the 3D picture stays exactly same, I get nauseous. There's a lot of people like me out there, and there's people for whom this is not nauseating, but immersion breaking nevertheless.

Until they work it out, there is no sense to buy it, no matter how "standardized" they make their gadgets as those gadgets are likely to become obsoleted by better 3D technology. What use would be standard 3D glasses when there's already prototypes of no glasses, parallax supporting 3D displays in the works?

Oh interesting, so they finally gave it a name. I remember coming across the 2-layer version of the display sometime ago. Looks like they also have an interesting theoretical foundation to go with it; the abstract of the first paper from Gordon Wetzstein's page gives a nice overview.

What essentially is going on is that you can model (at least when talking about things much larger than the wavelength of light) light as a four-dimensional function (i.e. intensity of light along all the possible rays that fill space), which is referred to in this research area as a "light field." Putting a mask somewhere in space will mask out a 2D-extrusion of the mask shape in 4D space. Putting multiple masks at different planes will mask out the product of this 2D-extrusions (and the extrusion angle varies as a function of depth). Hence, what they are doing is attempting to piece together the original 4D function by piecing together unmasked portions at each time frame.

For a more simplified view, you can think of this as trying to create a 2D picture through a sequence of special single-color 2D pictures created by placing stripe patterns oriented at a fixed set of angles on top of a light panel.

If you've taken linear algebra, it is somewhat like decomposing a matrix into a sum of rank-one matrices, except here each component needs to be positive (masks cannot create "negative" light).

That depends on the local laws in your area. For the United States, see this list of state laws: http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

That being said, if you are blocking traffic, you are a douchebag.

MIT hit a lot faster than a measly 36.7 million fps.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/gates1-0414.html

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

"The William H. Gates Foundation has donated $20 million for construction of a building that will become the new home for MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), President Charles M. Vest announced today."

---

* Had to post that "for posterities' sake" & to "back my words" above... Slashdot's made me "big on that", because just stating facts here without the 'fabled':

[citation]

?

Opens the door to "nitpickers"... & I won't have that.

APK

P.S.=> Again & ABOVE ALL ELSE here - A man's STILL FREE to manage his monies as he sees fit and he's fighting disease, helping education & more doing so - there you are!

ADDITIONALLY:

What Mr. Gates is doing is better than letting "gov't. bureaucracy" make it possible for (what bothers me MOST)

Think THAT doesn't go on? Wake the hell up!

The rest of what's being done by "King Billy's" seen easily on the "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" website here -> http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx and, it's certainly NOT "EVIL"... not anymore than you doing YOUR taxes & electing tax breaks where possible!

... apk

You realize who's going to make a killing manufacturing these nanofactories, right? The pharmaceutical industry. Even more amusingly, look at who funds the facility where most of the research took place. Yes, those Koch Brothers.

Go pander your conspiracies somewhere else.

Figure 8 on Page 6 of the actual paper shows what they're measuring. They're comparing filter materials by Salt rejection % vs Water permeability measured in L/cm2/day/MPa. That unit incorporates all the energy-efficeny goodness you want in a filter without looking at what pump technology is actually used to provide the energy input. It says that more filtered water (L) per square centimeter of filter (/cm2) per day (/day) per MegaPascal of pressure (/MPa, the energy input) is more good. Assuming any particular pump technology would give you a number for MPa/MJ that you could apply, but it doesn't help you understadn the performance of the filter itself. The figure for improvement vs existing technology they actually give is 2-3 orders of magnitude (100-1000x) so TFS is taking the optimistic side.

The bottom line is that this has a huge potential but is still a ways from practical application.

Here's a link to the original paper on Grossman's website.

Here's the real article (AFAIK) from The Grossman Group @ MIT, no need for credentials.
Water Desalination across Nanoporous Graphene (Warning PDF Link): http://zeppola.mit.edu/pubs/nl3012853.pdf

The main site for the Grossman Group is also pretty fascinating: http://zeppola.mit.edu/

Here's the real article (AFAIK) from The Grossman Group @ MIT, no need for credentials.
Water Desalination across Nanoporous Graphene (Warning PDF Link): http://zeppola.mit.edu/pubs/nl3012853.pdf

The main site for the Grossman Group is also pretty fascinating: http://zeppola.mit.edu/

I know that, and I don't advocate for petitions and other useless bullshit.

My point is that the reaction to those changes in their bottom line won't be "well, then let's give the Chinese workers a decent pay, working conditions, etc" but "well, if we have to pay for a decent salary, then China is no longer interesting" and will leave them worse off, for no good reason except self-righteousness.

Salaries in China have been rising steadily over the years. If we actually want to help them - as opposed to feel good about ourselves while they starve - then we should stop this nonsense.

This article from '97 explains it well:

Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land--or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?
              The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit--and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions.
              This sounds only fair--but is it? Let's think through the consequences.

        First of all, even if we could assure the workers in Third World export industries of higher wages and better working conditions, this would do nothing for the peasants, day laborers, scavengers, and so on who make up the bulk of these countries' populations. At best, forcing developing countries to adhere to our labor standards would create a privileged labor aristocracy, leaving the poor majority no better off.
              And it might not even do that. The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable. The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

I suggest reading this. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11696

Not only was the memory limited but they didn't even have enough memory for a frame buffer so they used a line buffer. You had to make the program fast enough to write the data into the register before it was scanned to the screen. What is crazy is that even though there were only two bit mapped sprites, two 2 pixel missiles, and a one pixel ball you could really do a lot more by changing the colors and locations of these things between scan lines.

One interesting story was in Yars Revenge they ran out of memory to store color data. So in the one place on the screen where there was a safe zone it just read random data from the program to generate this random static looking area. That was good enough to get the program to fit.

The E911 Hacker Crackdown found that many hackers are compulsive braggers. Something about their personality makes it hard to avoid when someone actually expresses interest (even if it is a police officer who is only interested because he wants to prosecute).

I program i C++. I do not mean the parentheses :p,just little blocks.So does that mean I now have to program in C11 on http://scratch.mit.edu/ ?

I knew I saw this stuff before... Siggraph 2005 http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/motionmag/motionmag.html

Speaking of which, how much would 17km/s be in Sheppeis per Tatum grid? Good old "units" doesn't know either of those units.

Sheppey: A measure of distance equal to about 78 of a mile (1.4 km), defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque.

Tatum Grid: the lowest regular pulse train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events.

Oh, God. What happened with the good old FFF?

Speaking of which, how much would 17km/s be in Sheppeis per Tatum grid? Good old "units" doesn't know either of those units.

Sheppey: A measure of distance equal to about 78 of a mile (1.4 km), defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque.

Tatum Grid: the lowest regular pulse train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events.

Cheap as in dirt-cheap isn't the way to go when you have space tourists willing to blow a normal person's annual salary on a joyride. It would be better to design as suit that looks good, while functioning well. I'm think along the lines of Dava Newman's prototype Bio-Suit, a sleek looking design that doesn't make the presumably fit space traveller looking like the Teletubbies or the Pillsbury Dough boy.

The Bio-Suit is sleek because it is supposed to work on "mechanical counter-pressure" rather than through simple air pressure. That's the theory anyway. Here's hoping she and her team work out the kinks.

In 1980-1981, a year of Tuition at MIT cost ~$7,400 before scholarship, a year over year increase of 17%. [$70 million in tuition & fees / 9,365 students]

And the fiscal year ended in a pall of gloom, as severe cuts in financial aid programs seem inevitable for the coming years. Never has our growing dependence upon Federal aid been felt so keenly, as the prospects of its withdrawal grow upon us.

In 1988-1989, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $13,400 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 8.2%.

In 2000-2001, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $31,900 before scholarships.

In 2011-2012, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $40,732 before scholarships.

In 2012-2013, a year of Tuition & Fees at MIT will cost $42,050 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 3.25 %.

In 1980-1981, a year of Tuition at MIT cost ~$7,400 before scholarship, a year over year increase of 17%. [$70 million in tuition & fees / 9,365 students]

And the fiscal year ended in a pall of gloom, as severe cuts in financial aid programs seem inevitable for the coming years. Never has our growing dependence upon Federal aid been felt so keenly, as the prospects of its withdrawal grow upon us.

In 1988-1989, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $13,400 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 8.2%.

In 2000-2001, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $31,900 before scholarships.

In 2011-2012, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $40,732 before scholarships.

In 2012-2013, a year of Tuition & Fees at MIT will cost $42,050 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 3.25 %.

In 1980-1981, a year of Tuition at MIT cost ~$7,400 before scholarship, a year over year increase of 17%. [$70 million in tuition & fees / 9,365 students]

And the fiscal year ended in a pall of gloom, as severe cuts in financial aid programs seem inevitable for the coming years. Never has our growing dependence upon Federal aid been felt so keenly, as the prospects of its withdrawal grow upon us.

In 1988-1989, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $13,400 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 8.2%.

In 2000-2001, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $31,900 before scholarships.

In 2011-2012, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $40,732 before scholarships.

In 2012-2013, a year of Tuition & Fees at MIT will cost $42,050 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 3.25 %.

In 1980-1981, a year of Tuition at MIT cost ~$7,400 before scholarship, a year over year increase of 17%. [$70 million in tuition & fees / 9,365 students]

And the fiscal year ended in a pall of gloom, as severe cuts in financial aid programs seem inevitable for the coming years. Never has our growing dependence upon Federal aid been felt so keenly, as the prospects of its withdrawal grow upon us.

In 1988-1989, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $13,400 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 8.2%.

In 2000-2001, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $31,900 before scholarships.

In 2011-2012, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $40,732 before scholarships.

In 2012-2013, a year of Tuition & Fees at MIT will cost $42,050 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 3.25 %.

In 1980-1981, a year of Tuition at MIT cost ~$7,400 before scholarship, a year over year increase of 17%. [$70 million in tuition & fees / 9,365 students]

And the fiscal year ended in a pall of gloom, as severe cuts in financial aid programs seem inevitable for the coming years. Never has our growing dependence upon Federal aid been felt so keenly, as the prospects of its withdrawal grow upon us.

In 1988-1989, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $13,400 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 8.2%.

In 2000-2001, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $31,900 before scholarships.

In 2011-2012, a year of Tuition at MIT cost $40,732 before scholarships.

In 2012-2013, a year of Tuition & Fees at MIT will cost $42,050 before scholarships, a year over year increase of 3.25 %.

"What! will you never cease prating of laws to us that have swords by our sides?" - Pompey

http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/

I think the head positioning and input could be both dealt with by the same way - have a head mounted camera too (ideally it would be part of the glasses).
in a static environment ( say, a room or something) it should be possible to capture and triangulate fixed features in the room, and calculate your head position from them. you might have to go through some kind of calibration step if tracking feattures like wall edges or obkects that are an unknown distance and size, or you could use printed reference marks that are of a known size that you could place in your environment. I have seen some pretty effective position tracking of things with markers on them using OpenVL, to track a patterned marker on a cap, but if you turned this around and triangulated the camera's position from a fixed feature or two in a room, you would know the camera position/orientation and hence the head position.

Your hands within the same field of view could then be tracked and used for input - to make it easier for the system you could wear some kind of patterned gloves, like this http://people.csail.mit.edu/rywang/handtracking/ to type on a virtual keyboard. Downside: it's going to probably take a lot more more CPU than you have available on an arduino or something lightweight like that.

it's no different than App Creator

App inventor wasn't killed.

It was gifted to MIT. You can use it here: http://www.appinventor.mit.edu/

It was open sourced and is available at http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu/ I plan to use it with my kids this summer.

Anant Agarwal recently reported that at the course MIT 6.002 where textbooks are freely available for students, the textbook sales have gone through the roof. Publishers currently learn from such cases. This patent is complete nonsense. No teacher would make financial payments linked to grades.

Anant Agarwal recently reported that at the course MIT 6.002 where textbooks are freely available for students, the textbook sales have gone through the roof. Publishers currently learn from such cases. This patent is complete nonsense. No teacher would make financial payments linked to grades.

I was a sysadmin at Octel Communications back in the day. Octel invented voice mail; perhaps you've heard of it.

When I hired on we had three Sun 3/280 servers. I think these were 60830 boxen, but they might have been '020s. They were primarily used for cross-compiling the homebrew RTOS that Octels voice mail machines ran, but they were also used for Electronic Design Automation.

There was a mysterious problem that from time to time would cause one of the servers to go to its knees for an hour or two, but not actually crash. Because all three machines were NFS hard-mounted on each other, as soon as one machine got stuck, they were all stuck. 250 engineers all got to sit on their hands while I contemplated whether I'd be a few inches short of a head by the end of the workday.

I asked a colleague why we didn't soft-mount the NFS shares. That would allow a client of a hung server to timeout. My colleague's reply was that, at the time at least, we couldn't count on our development tools to do the right thing if they got read or write errors during a build. It was felt that soft-mounting might lead to bad machine code generation.

In the end it turned out that the hung servers was caused by high capacitance serial cables. When a machine would emit "SunOS Login:", it would receive a capacitively-couple bunch of garbage back, that login would take as the username. Login would then prompt "Password:", and receive again garbage for the password "attempt". Each machine had 32 serial lines, some of them going hundreds of feet. Good thing I studied Physics and not Computer Science!

The solution was to buy a big, long, expensive spool of serial cable that had lower capacitance per foot, as well as a bunch of RS-232 plug kits, and then to tear out and replace all the cable. That took some convincing to get the management to give me the budget and the time to do the work, but in the end all I required to convince my manager Karen Coates was to hook a glass TTY up to a scope.

In Other News: I have been doing some study of security, and will have results to announce soon. These results will be digitally signed. Please use a keyserver to download my Public Key into your keyring. Please use nothing other than my key fingerprint; key emails and Key IDs can be spoofed:

Fingerprint=9B9F 2D03 9996 AF83 9A4F CB26 20E8 0D0B F760 5786

NRCC

Keep reading: "...or at least an amateur." You're right, though, I chose my words poorly. There were (and are) some very skilled, talented hackers at MIT. (Look no further than HAKMEM!) Hacks are still hacks, though, clever as they may be. The TMRC hackers (perhaps the largest MIT hacker contingent I'm aware of outside the famed MIT AI lab) describe themselves thusly:

We at TMRC use the term "hacker" only in its original meaning, someone who applies ingenuity to create a clever result, called a "hack". The essence of a "hack" is that it is done quickly, and is usually inelegant. It accomplishes the desired goal without changing the design of the system it is embedded in. Despite often being at odds with the design of the larger system, a hack is generally quite clever and effective.

Most inspiring course that I've seen:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-012-introduction-to-biology-fall-2004/

Biology turns out to be way cooler than all this computer stuff. The cells in your body are actually stochastic digital computers which were not designed by a human intelligence, and so we're basically hacking alien computers to figure out how life works, and these computers are WAY more complicated and powerful than anything you've ever experienced.

If you're a young tech geek, then this might just inspire a career-path change.

The MIT OCW course linked here has both audio and video lectures (I first listened to the audio version and was able to get most of it without needing the video content). Don't get too bogged down in the chemistry at the beginning. And know that what we know has increased dramatically from the time of this 2004 snapshot.

It's getting a bit long in the tooth now (there's an updated 701SC in their simplistic "Scholar" series, but I find it just too light and fluffy without most of the really inspiring stuff). Hopefully they will release the full 7.012 from fall 2011 at some point.

G.

FREE STUFF

UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

MIT OpenCourseWare (haven't tried, but hear good things)

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Khan academy (of course)
http://www.khanacademy.org/

PAID RESOURCES

Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/
(Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)

Also, don't discount old fashioned books:

The "Head First" series of books
(Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)

Head First Physics

Home Schooling Curricula
Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.

Textbooks!
Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:

Chemistry (Oxtoby-Nachtrieb) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Chemistry-Fifth-Edition/dp/B001F39B2Y
(There are many nicely written Biology books -- see what you like)

And if you really want to enjoy chemistry:

Chemical Demonstrations, Shakhashiri

(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)

You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...

Yes and no. If you learn by hearing and seeing, as well as reading, then watching lectures online helps a lot, in addition to reading the book. For Physics, MIT's Lewin's physics course is pretty good:

So long as we use the real physicists definitions and not something out of Stargate SG1, those parallels will always remain undetectable. SF writers tell stories about interacting with other universes - physicists define them in ways that show they can't be interacted with to be verified.

(emphasis added) Your implication is that physicists have invented parallel universes, adding them to their theories. In actuality, parallel realities are predictions of certain modern theories. They are not axioms, they are results. Max Tegmark explains this nicely in a commentary (here or here). Briefly: if unitary quantum mechanics is right (and all available data suggests that it is), then this implies that the other branches of the wavefunction are just as real as the one we experience. Hence, quantum mechanics predicts that these other branches exist. Now, you can frame a philosophical question about whether entities in a theory 'exist' or whether they are just abstractions. But it's worth noting that there are plenty of theoretical entities that we now accept as being real (atoms, quarks, spacetime, etc.). Moreover, there are many times in physics where, once we accept a theory as being right, we accept its predictions about things we can't directly observe. Two examples would be: to the extent that we accept general relativity as correct, we make predictions about the insides of black holes, even though we can't ever observe those areas. To the extent that we accept astrophysics and big-bang models, we make predictions about parts of the universe we cannot ever observe (e.g. beyond the cosmic horizon).

An untestable idea isn't part of science.

Indeed. But while we can't directly observe other branches of the wavefunction, we can, through experiments, theory, and modeling, indirectly learn much about them. We can have a lively philosophical debate about to what extent we are justified in using predictions of theories to say indirect things are 'real' vs. 'abstract only'... but my point is that parallel realities are not alone here. Every measurement we make is an indirect inference based on limited data, extrapolated using a model we have some measure of confidence in.

Occam's Razor ...

Occam's Razor is frequently invoked but is not always as useful as people make it out to be. If you have a theory X and a theory X+Y that both describe the data equally well, then X is better via Occam's Razor. But if you're comparing theories X+Y and X+Z, it's not clear which is "simpler". You're begging the question if you say "Clearly X+Y is simpler than X+Z! Just look at how crazy Z is!" More specifically: unitary quantum mechanics is arguably simpler than quantum mechanics + collapse. The latter involves adding an ad-hoc, unmeasured, non-linear process that has never actually been observed. The former is simpler at least in description (it's just QM without the extra axiom), but as a consequence predicts many parallel branches (it's actually not an infinite number of branches: for a finite volume like our observable universe, the possible quantum states is large but finite). Whether an ad-hoc axiom or a parallal-branch-prediction is 'simpler' is debatable.

Just about any other idea looks preferrable to an idea that postulates an infinite number of unverifiable consequents.

Again, the parallel branches are not a postulate, but a prediction. They are a prediction that bother many people. Yet attempts to find inconsistencies in unitary quantum mechanics so far have failed. Attempts to observe the wavefunction collapse process have also failed (there appears to be no

Yes, Krugman, that neocon: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

Actually, not buying from them would be akin to slavery, since it'd remove their possibility of choosing between rural life and factory jobs.

Slavery wouldn't be slavery if the slaves had the choice between working there or not. Slavery was slavery because they had no choice. Which is exactly what self-righteous westerners are trying to do.

The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

Sure you can.

Comcast actually has done things this egregious - maybe you remember the "Get a Cable Modem, Go To Jail" event from the late 90s. But it's pretty rare.

By offloading the rote and basic informational dispersal to the students, that would hopefully free up the teacher to focus on walking through real demonstrations and examples, interacting with students, and helping out with some of the difficult-to-understand areas, instead of spending most of their time doing the same lecture-style material over and over.

In the subject I teach (physics), what you're describing is standard modern pedagogy. What I mean by the word "standard" is that anybody who pays attention to the published empirical evidence knows that this is what you have to do in order to get decent results. It's not really new. A lot of the relevant work was done by Richard Hake (see this paper) in the early 90's, and it was popularized by Eric Mazur in his 1996 book Peer Instruction. What Hake and his colllaborators have shown is that in traditional lecture-style courses, the amount of conceptual understanding that students gain (compared to what they had entering the course) is always extremely small, and there are no exceptions to this rule. The findings apply even to lecturers who have won awards, get wonderful student evaluations, etc. Techniques like the ones you're describing have been shown to do significantly better.

The problem is simply that most teachers don't pay attention to the empirical evidence -- which is pretty pathetic for someone teaching a subject like physics, which is supposed to be an empirical science. Rather than doing what works according to the evidence, they do what their own professors did when they were undergraduates.

A secondary problem is that students typically prefer traditional lecturing, because it doesn't make as many demands on them. They come to class without reading the book, sit passively in their seats, doodle in their notebooks, and think about sex.

All of the discussion going on about teaching programming in schools is a great new/old trend. Like many posters here, I learned basic programming skills years ago in middle / high school. But then that all changed somewhere along the line.

School technology courses began to focus on turning students into secretaries - students learn Microsoft Office. If you're lucky, they'll teach design skills (PhotoShop, etc.) The other trend these days is about using Web 2.0 to enable collaboration, which is not bad in and of itself, but misses the mark. That's where programming comes (back) in.

There are a lot of great free resources out there. I have taught programming using Scratch to third graders, Microsoft SmallBasic to fifth graders, and JavaScript to ninth graders. There is also GameMaker, which has a free lite version that allows for drag-n-drop game programming. Microsoft also has Kodu, which let's kids make 3D games with a drag-n-drop interface.

A few months ago I gave a TEDxTokyo presentation on the subject (excuse the shameless plug), which you may find interesting, possibly even entertaining...

Hmm, it seems that /.ers don't have children (even the ones who can remember back to the '80s). In the school where my kids go, a local robotics nerd is teaching programming to grades 3 and onwards using Scratch and they're loving it. Yes, Scratch has a colourful GUI for junior programmers and doesn't let you edit your code in vi, but it has loops, objects, methods, variables, and most of the constructs that older programmers use.

Now if I could only get my 6th grader to stop fixing bugs in his maze and start watching his TV like he's supposed to ....

MIT still does: http://web.mit.edu/nrl/www/