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Yeah the Executive MBA program at MIT is probably great. But, it's also completely cost-prohibitive for the vast majority of people.

From: http://emba.mit.edu/admissions/tuition-and-expenses/

Required fees (Class of 2014, matriculating October 2012)
Tuition: $141,000 (includes books, course readers, and printed materials)
Other estimated expenses (not included in tuition fees and not required for all MIT EMBA participants):
      â Hotel accommodations: $20,000 (not required)
      â Travel: varies based on where the participant lives
      â Computer and supplies: $3,500 (if you anticipate buying a new computer)
      â Health insurance: All students must have health insurance. You may continue your current US-based insurance if it meets MITâ(TM)s health insurance requirements. Otherwise, you must purchase MIT insurance. Review insurance rates.

I mean, if someone is working for a top company and is a top executive or plans to be, $141k may not seem like all that much money. However, most people will not realize the benefits of that degree in any meaningful way over the course of the remainder of their career, especially someone in the late stages.

Pay the $30,000 it costs just about everywhere else and you can pay off the debt in just two or three years following your promotion which, in most places, will net you only $10k to $15k in the short term rather than taking you what is most likely the rest of your career.

SciGen was out in 2005.

Suddenly we're gonna need to be reviewing the "Science Fiction" section of the lit world for some advice how to handle the rise of sentient AI.

Kubrick 1968 suggested "screwdriver" while Cameron, 1984 gave a persuasive argument in favour of "shotguns and homemade pipe bombs".

We would have had hard AI already if we had spent the last 10 years and the trillion dollars on it like we pushed for the moon. But no, Beating People Up is more fun.

Who's to say you can't have both? That's why it's called the Defense Advanced Projects Agency!

But seriously, DARPA did in fact sponsor pretty much exactly the kind of "moon shot" program you are arguing for, throughout the 1980s. They spent a billion dollars and it was called the Strategic Computing Initiative (as a marketing phrase to compete with Strategic Defense Initiative, DARPA's other big baby). The results in VLSI chip manufacture were impressive; the results in general-purpose AI, which was mostly Lisp-based, not so much. The collapse of SCI funding led to the AI Winter and arguably the loss of a whole generation of software development techniques. DARPA's focus switched to making computers dumb and fast rather than making them self-aware. Lisp and logic programming fell, TCP/IP and C++ rose, and the results are the Internet as we know it: fast and massively scalable, yet riddled with security flaws and logical inconsistencies.

It turns out that even with all the money in the world, we really don't have an idea of how the human mind-brain works. At best we have a bunch of disconnected algorithms and partial models, but no way to wire them together. At least, that was pretty much the conclusion of the book I read; ironically for a program focused on AI theories revolving around connection between communicating subsystems, SCI itself failed on its lack of communication between its participants (academic, commercial and military). That seems significant.

Could another SCI happen in the 2010s? Maybe. But I doubt that the results would be any more impressive than what we've already achieved with Google, Cyc, Wikipedia and Watson.

If you really want to try something cutting edge but still want to stay high level with your programming, I'd strongly suggest Scratch:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

In spite of all of the junior high kids that make apps in the language, there is a strong adult community there as well... usually talking about educational applications of the language but sometimes getting into more serious programming discussions too. Some modding goes on, but if you have been out of the loop for 20 years from doing much programming, it will give you a fresh perspective in terms of newer programming paradigms and allow you to have some fun at the same time. Don't dismiss the power of this language as it has done some pretty amazing things, including emulating an operating system, doing finite state machines, and almost anything else you can imagine. Its power is more with multimedia development (rendering graphics, sprite manipulation, and audio integration into projects is like breathing air and foundational to the language), but it has pointers, arrays, and some nifty I/O controls as well. Some strong limits, but I presume by your restriction on language choices that you want a high level language.

If you want to get real retro though, I would strongly recommend that you check out the DCPU-16. This is going to be the base "computer" used for a really cool science fiction game. If you want to have automated drones frying opponents on other continents, this is an environment you might want to check out. There are some compilers already written for this "computer within a computer" and even a couple of operating systems, but it has a real retro feel for what computers were like 20 years ago. For more information, see also the 0x10^c Wiki. Full all out cyber warfare is encouraged in this game too. Viruses, trojans, social exploiits, buffer overflows, and every trick in the book you can think of is going to play a part in this game. I don't know about the legality of those actions within the game, but if you really want to get into true hacking, this is a game for you.

Also: http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/midas.html

http://people.csail.mit.edu/mhcoen/Globe/Globe.html

I was about to ask "what is OCW?" but then I remembered let me google that for you. :-)

OCW is "open CourseWare." Here's the link: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

It's a different meaning of the word.

MIT has monitored bathrooms, does that count?

And to troll a little bit, what happens to my coffeepot if it dies with a bluescreen?

Yes, the model makes assumptions. And yes, they are demonstrably invalid. And yes, the Black-Scholes equation is a parabolic P.D.E. that can be transformed into the one-dimensional heat equation and solved (although that isn't the only, or even IMO a particularly insightful way of arriving at the Black-Scholes option pricing formulae). None of this means the Black-Scholes model is useless, or that it caused the credit crunch.

To avoid writing an absurdly huge essay, I'll try and keep myself to a collection of reasonably concise points.

1. As someone else has already pointed out, Black-Scholes does not assume that markets do not trend (if by 'trend' you mean non-stochastic drift). You don't understand risk-neutral valuation, but sadly you have plenty of company, even amongst those who use it on a daily basis.
2. For a model to be invalid, it is not sufficient for its assumptions to be invalid. It also has to be sensitive to those assumptions. The whole point of a model is to selectively ignore certain aspects of a complex system in order to make it tractable, in the hope of achieving insights that apply to real-world system despite the simplifications that permitted the model to be constructed. Pointing at the assumptions of Black-Scholes and crying out "Continuous hedging? You've got to be kidding!" is not, on its own, an insightful critique of the model.
3. There are many markets and many models. Black-Scholes is the simplest option pricing model in one of the simplest markets, equity derivatives. The models used in practice vary widely depending on requirements. Nobody, or at least nobody competent, thinks Black-Scholes is all there is, though it actually is perfectly adequate for some limited uses. Why do all these other models exist? Is it just because lots of MIT students wanted to show off how clever they are? Partly, perhaps. But it's also because people in finance are perfectly aware of the limitations of Black-Scholes, and of all the other models out there, and are continually trying to do better. (It is true, though, that option pricing models generally live within a framework that was generalised from Black-Scholes.)
4. The credit crisis is/was just that: a credit crisis. Black-Scholes isn't a credit model, it's an option pricing model. The crisis didn't originate in the equities markets (or anything similar to it), so it wasn't the fault of Black-Scholes. If any model is to blame, it's copula models, as this article points out: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant.
5. Mathematical modelling is a perfectly valid way of reasoning about complex systems. Aside from modelling, what are the alternatives? There's intuition, of course, and there's qualitative economic thinking (quantitative economic thinking is mathematical modelling). Both of those obviously should be applied, no argument there. What else? Technical analysis? That's pretty dubious IMO, but I guess it has its place. But these don't take the place of quantitative analysis, they are complementary to it. Maths is one of the tools available to market participants, and they would be silly to ignore it.
6. That said, anyone who mistakes a model for reality is an idiot. And sadly there are plenty of idiots out there.
7. And even if you're not an idiot, the ways models interact with markets is complex and poorly understood. A model on its own doesn't do anything. What matters is how people use it. What happens when a model is used? What is it used for? When it's used does it change the market? Does it change the market in such a way as to make the model more or less valid? Here's a fascinating read on those kinds of topics: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10841.

Does all of this mean that quants are angels, models are great and bankers are all wonderful people? No. Greed had plenty to do

Even though the U.S. dollar is experiencing rampant inflation in 2012

This is a false statement, unless you consider low single digits to be rampant.

The CPI and BPP bear this out. The CPI is done by the government, so if there was enough of a conspiracy, they could conspire to keep the official numbers down. I don't think any alleged conspiracy could reach the BPP.

This was made worse by the Republican Conservative Right who seem to think research is a conspiracy to overturn the truths they see in the Bible.

This simply isn't true. First, it was killed in 1993, when Democrats controlled both chambers in Congress. Second, the vote didn't break down by partisan lines, but by chamber lines. The Senate supported it, and a majority of both parties in the House opposed it. In the Senate, the support for the project was overwhelmingly on the Republican side.

The House of Representatives voted three times in 1992 and 1993 to kill the SSC; the final pivotal vote was 159-264 (139 Cong. Rec. H8124 (daily ed. Oct. 19, 1993)). The Senate voted to rescue it each time; their last vote in favor was 57-42 (139 Cong. Rec. S12,760 (daily ed. Sept. 30, 1993)).

In 1993, the two houses met in a conference committee twice; the first time the Senate negotiators won and the SSC was left in the bill. The second time the House won. In the end the conference report was adopted by both houses with large majorities: 332-81 in the House, 139 Cong Rec H8435 (daily ed. Oct. 26, 1993), and 89-11 in the Senate, 139 Cong Rec S14483 (daily ed. Oct. 27, 1993).

From Lexis-Nexis, here is the roll call for the 57-42 Senate vote, which worked out to 26-29 among Democrats (voting to preserve the collider) and 31-13 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...

Here's the roll call for the 159-264 vote in the House, which was 98-153 among Democrats and 61-111 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...

Without an agreement, funding died. The leading voice for the death of the SSC was in fact a Democrat.

Unless you can find evidence to the contrary, I cannot recall a single religious leader protesting the SSC on grounds that it would contradict religious teachings, except for liberal Christians that argued the funds should be better used for so-called social justice efforts. Support for the SSC in most conservative denominations was uniformly high. I recall Pat Robertson lamenting the cancellation of the project on television. History simply doesn't match up to your assertion on this.

This was made worse by the Republican Conservative Right who seem to think research is a conspiracy to overturn the truths they see in the Bible.

This simply isn't true. First, it was killed in 1993, when Democrats controlled both chambers in Congress. Second, the vote didn't break down by partisan lines, but by chamber lines. The Senate supported it, and a majority of both parties in the House opposed it. In the Senate, the support for the project was overwhelmingly on the Republican side.

The House of Representatives voted three times in 1992 and 1993 to kill the SSC; the final pivotal vote was 159-264 (139 Cong. Rec. H8124 (daily ed. Oct. 19, 1993)). The Senate voted to rescue it each time; their last vote in favor was 57-42 (139 Cong. Rec. S12,760 (daily ed. Sept. 30, 1993)).

In 1993, the two houses met in a conference committee twice; the first time the Senate negotiators won and the SSC was left in the bill. The second time the House won. In the end the conference report was adopted by both houses with large majorities: 332-81 in the House, 139 Cong Rec H8435 (daily ed. Oct. 26, 1993), and 89-11 in the Senate, 139 Cong Rec S14483 (daily ed. Oct. 27, 1993).

From Lexis-Nexis, here is the roll call for the 57-42 Senate vote, which worked out to 26-29 among Democrats (voting to preserve the collider) and 31-13 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...

Here's the roll call for the 159-264 vote in the House, which was 98-153 among Democrats and 61-111 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...

Without an agreement, funding died. The leading voice for the death of the SSC was in fact a Democrat.

Unless you can find evidence to the contrary, I cannot recall a single religious leader protesting the SSC on grounds that it would contradict religious teachings, except for liberal Christians that argued the funds should be better used for so-called social justice efforts. Support for the SSC in most conservative denominations was uniformly high. I recall Pat Robertson lamenting the cancellation of the project on television. History simply doesn't match up to your assertion on this.

Various universities structure things differently. I have no idea what computer science "should" be, but here's a sampling:

Carnegie Mellon - School of Computer Science.
Computer Science Department
Entertainment Technology Center
Institute for Software Research
Robotics Institute
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Lane Center for Computational Biology
Language Technologies Institute
Machine Learning Department

At CMU, CS gets its own school/department/division, as well as its own major within that.

MIT - School of Engineering Includes:
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Materials Science and Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Nuclear Science and Engineering
Aeronautics and Astronautics
Biological Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Civil and Environmental Engineering

So it's a combined program within the engineering department.

CalTech - similar to MIT - Division of Engineering and Applied Science
Aerospace
Applied Physics and Materials Science
Bioengineering
Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Electrical Engineering
Environmental Science and Engineering
Mechanical and Civil Engineering

Again combined, but with math, and under sciences.

WISC - Department of Computer Sciences under the College of Letters & Science

Again, nested, but not a combined major.

YMMV.

According to the MIT website, the "Mr. Perelman" the NYT article keeps mentioning is actually "Dr. Perelman". Does the NYT not believe in honorifics? Or do they just think that only MDs should be called "Dr."?

As chance would have it, I was at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club open house last night (Saturday 21 April 2012). TMRC, for those who don't know, is a well-spring of hacker subculture. Their model railroad layout is fully automated using homebrew control and interface hardware, and their own Linux-based software. Formerly it ran on adapted telephone switch relays.

Anyhow, their layout includes a scale model of the Green building, and yes, you can play Tetris on it. Granted, it's not as impressive as doing it on the *real* building, but there's something to be said for prior art. ;)

I'll see if I can't get a video of it uploaded.

"A recent global survey of more than 4,000 senior managers by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that the majority (54%) favored new business models over new products and services as a source of future competitive advantage.”

There's definitely incredible potential with the ability to engineer natural killer cells, no doubt about it. But I see a simpler and sooner available solution to HIV and other viral disease with DRACOs (altho it maybe only treatable with these in an early stage or as a 'temporary universal vaccine'). DRACOs (Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizers) are the class of combo ds-DNA detection protein and a programmed cell-death signal protein. The combination makes the cell's automatic suicide process extremely sensitive to viral presence (preventing the cell from hosting viral reproduction). Only invented last year, these are still awaiting human testing, but they do appear to be a miraculously perfect cure/temporary vaccine for apparently ALL viral disease. These are pretty much the most promising looking antiviral drugs ever. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/antiviral-0810.html

Since this is News for Nerds, North Korea's abduction of MIT Student Jae Hwan Lee might be relevant.

Well, alleged abduction -- North Korea claims he defected willingly (which I suppose is somehow congruent with his later death in a political prisoner camp).

Chinese people aren't threated by force into working in factories, they're forced because the alternative is worse. By not buying their products you're taking away their choice and helping to contribute to their famine.

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

nb. The 'three CPUs' thing isn't done for detection of hardware faults it's for software faults. The idea is to get three different programmers to write three different programs with a specified output. You then compare the outputs of the programs and if one is different it's likely to be a bug.

Yes it is. Specifically, you need three to not only detect that one is misbehaving, but also to determine which is more likely to misbehave. This is if you can trust you comparison node. If you cannot, then in general you need at a minimum of 3n+1 nodes to detect 'n' nodes misbehaving given a Byzantine failure formulation. (That's why the Space Shuttle had 4 primary flight control computers all running the same software. And a fifth one that didn't, but that was different.) Many systems, e.g. in telecoms, still make due with two, and then go to a special fautl recovery mode when a failure/error is detected.

Indeed, having three separate channels, all running the same software, is the most common in e.g. flight control situations. Running "different" software doesn't actually work, (Knight and Leveson demonstrated this quite some time ago, see e.g. http://sunnyday.mit.edu/critics.pdf which contains their response to later critisisms and a ref to the original study), i.e. programmers don't make independent faults. Different software does wreak havoc with running in parallell though, so it's rarely (if ever) done in practice.

I highly recommend the MIT OpenCourseWare course on Python. It is written in a very simple and welcoming manner, and includes a free textbook, labs, lecture materials, and homework assignments. Python is probably the best route regardless, as it makes both an excellent teaching language, and a very useful language to use outside the classroom in the real world. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/ There are also a variety of Karel the Robot style introductory systems, including at least one ported over from the original Pascal dialect to Python. Karel the robot provides a limited subset of a typical programming language, and labs that allow a student to practice ordering a robot around an obstacle course. The pascal-based version was my first intro to programming, and it makes a great way to learn still to this day.

Also being a 'seasoned' developer I'm wondering why not a 'real' language like C as opposed to scripting languages.

Dynamic (scripting) languages are no less "real" than compiled languages. Both have their place, their strengths, and their weaknesses, which is something a "seasoned developer" should know.

An instruction language should just get out of your way and let you concentrate on doing stuff and understanding the CONCEPTS, instead of concentrating on making the compiler/interpreter understand you or doing routine housekeeping (eg: memory management). This is true for real-world development, but is especially relevant when teaching someone how to program. For this reason, Python is an excellent choice as a first language -- even MIT uses Python as a teaching language. (I can't think of a better endorsement than that)

The advantage that Python has over other dynamic languages (Perl, Ruby) is that it is designed for readability and clarity. Even as a die-hard Perl programmer, even I can admit that Python is an easier language to learn and explain, and is probably the first language I'll teach my children. Whether it's (IMHO) dumbed-down syntax is an advantage or a disadvantage for doing serious work is a subject of debate (if not holy wars).

C is a wonderful language for a specific class of problem, but it has lots of problems that make it suboptimal (if not completely unsuitable) for other tasks. Knowing *when* to use C (and, more importantly, when *not* to use it) is as important as knowing *how* to use it, if not more so. It is not a good teaching language for a beginning programmer, any more than it is a good language for general application development. Someone who doesn't understand this has no business calling themselves a "seasoned developer".

A lot of people these days recommend Python as a first language. It is easy to learn and powerful. I don't know which of them is best, but here's a list of Python tutorials aimed at non-programmers.

Another interesting choice might be Scheme. There are two very good books that use Scheme to teach programming:

• How to Design Programs is aimed at roughly your son's age group.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is aimed at university students and assumes some basic knowledge of calculus (which I'm guessing is over your son's head, but maybe not!)

DrRacket is a good programming environment to use with either of them.

I believe it depends on how advanced your son is and what it is about programming that interests him. If he is highly analytic and mathematically inclined C could be a good start. Memory management in C is not simple though and pointers can be very confusing. Also, since it is pretty low level he won't be doing much in the way of graphics without learning an API. The good thing is so many languages share syntax with C.

However, if your son wants to learn programming predicated solely on his love of video games for instance, C may be a little too dry so to speak. In that case, I feel Flash is a good learning tool because it lets you very quickly and easily get graphics on the screen doing something. JavaScript/HTML5's canvas are a good choice as well.

If your son is gifted, and I don't mean in the way every parent thinks their child is, I mean truly advanced; I'd highly recommend the text "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". It is the text used for the introductory computer science at MIT and many other colleges. The entire book is available for free online, with sample exercises, answers, etc. And since it is so widely used and well regarded there is quite a bit of help out there. The language this uses is Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. Again, this is if your son is at the level of an honors-student high school senior or college freshman. If he does make it through this book he will have a very firm understanding of important computer science concepts.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

No matter what, your son will need SOME guidance. If you aren't able to provide it, you may want to set him up with an account on some web forums related to whatever you choose where he can ask questions.

Set him up with Scratch.

http://scratch.mit.edu/

I taught my daughter to program using it. It uses most if not all of the standard logical constructs, but instead of having to type and debug code, you drag and drop, attaching little lego-brick looking things together. It lets you focus on logic errors instead of syntax errors, and makes it a lot more accessible.

Also, you can log in to the scratch website and publish from within the Scratch IDE. This was a major source of encouragement for my kid, who is more driven by the appreciation of her peers than by the achievement itself. After our game got featured on the front of the website and over a hundred kids posted comments about how cool she was, it stopped being a way to spend time with Dad and became something exciting in its own right.

You can also download other kids programs, open them in the IDE and see exactly how they work. If you then create a derivative work and publish it, that will all be preserved... anyone looking at your program will be able to identify that you made it, what it was derived from, and who made the original. So, it teaches them to share, too, and helps them learn from each other.

Once he gets deeper into it, you can buy him some hardware and he can use scratch to control that. It's compatible with Lego, and also with the PicoBoard:

http://www.picocricket.com/picoboard.html

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Explains programming concepts though visual components.

The seminal paper proposing the use of switched/routed interconnection networks on-chip (NoCs) was published by Dally and Towels 11 years ago in DAC'01: Route packets, not wires: On-chip interconnection networks. The idea of associating a router to each core and replicating it in "tiles" is not new either; Tilera was (IIRC) the first company to sell processors based on a tiled design, which was an evolution of the RAW research project. A related research project, the TRIPs, replicated functional units on each tile, rather than full cores. Intel has used a tiled design in the Polaris, SSC and MIC (which includes the forthcoming Knights Corner).

So no, the idea of using routed interconnects is not new at all. In fact, after reading the linked article, turns out that 2/3ths of the text are introducing the idea, and the last section details the contributions: Two ideas developed by the group of Li-Shiuan Peh seeking to improve performance (by using virtual bypassing, a form of routing precomputation) and reducing power consumption (using low-swing signaling).

http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html

Yes. Rhetoric is a subject separate from philosophy or logic.

Excellent, maybe I'll go back to college and write a few term papers!

This article reminds me higher ups talk about what really happened on major programs, as compared to our perception while it was active. i.e. Space Shuttle development as perceived by most (laymen and enthusiasts) during 1970s/80s/90s as compared to later mentions i.e. http://waynehale.wordpress.com/ and http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/
Another example is Sputnik, how did USSR succeed when USA failed? There are two answers from the experts. One is what they said in 1957, and the other is what they said in 2007. Both are very different.

So....... I cannot wait to hear what "they" really gonna say what happened and why regarding VSE/Constellation/SLS/. But damn have to wait 20 years to find out the real scoop.

The Drake equation could be updated, but I think it has too many factors which have very high error margins. This just means that we would not be much smarter with the updated equation.
Hunt for the spectra of the atmospheres of exoplanets! That should give us some idea if life exists there or not.

Sorry to double--post; but the answer is right on the front page of the "course". To wit:

The course web site was developed and tested primarily with Google Chrome. We support current versions of Mozilla Firefox as well. The video player is designed to work with Flash. While we provide a partial non-Flash fallback for the video, as well as partial support for Internet Explorer, other browsers, and tablets, portions of the functionality will be unavailable. So, they say "For best results, use Chrome". They don't even MENTION Safari at ALL (and this is MIT we're talking about!!!!). Heck, they even say they only have "partial support" for IE.

I call "lazy coders"... Or ones who are Google fanbois/getting funding from Google.

Yes. VERY odd, since these are the recommended laptops for MIT Students. And HERE is an MIT Media Lab "success-story" page on Apple's site. And HERE is MIT's iOS APP!!!

Odd, indeed, don'tcha think?

Last time I used IPAD I tried to edit some circuits using an MTI web app (https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/ free login required, then go to Overview | Circuit Sandbox) but it did not work -- I could not move any part on the schematics. So maybe the APP has just to be fixed for the IPAD. Just saying it did not work for me and my instinct was to reach for a mouse.

I have run into a few websites that don't seem to "get" Mobile Safari's "click simulation". I have NO idea why; but they don't. You mentioned that it was a "web app". Perhaps it is a little slow on the uptake, and perhaps Safari's pseudo-clicks are a little too "short". I dunno. I'm not an iOS dev. But it does seem to work for 99.99% of the websites I've encountered; so I'd wager on an oddity on the "remote" side.

Can you visit the site/app with the "desktop" version of Safari and have it work?

For example, the online tax site I like to use absolutely REFUSES to work with Safari. It gets to a certain point in the scripts, and you can't convince it you "clicked" for NOTHIN'!!! So, I go "Oh, yeah, I remember", and fire up Firefox and continue. Both are Webkit browsers; so what's the difference? And since it is the ONLY site that does it, it is pretty much a "given" that it ain't Safari's fault, ya know?

I know you gave the iPad the benefit of the doubt; but I just wanted to emphasize that, as we all know, the "web" is anything BUT a haven for strictly-adhered-to standards, and so, if there happen to be some "outliers", well, dems da breaks...

I would be interested to know if it works with "regular" Safari, though.

Last time I used IPAD I tried to edit some circuits using an MTI web app (https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/ free login required, then go to Overview | Circuit Sandbox) but it did not work -- I could not move any part on the schematics. So maybe the APP has just to be fixed for the IPAD. Just saying it did not work for me and my instinct was to reach for a mouse.

There certainly is something else you can do. The US can revoke China's status as a Most Favored Nation trading partner. The abuses of Chinese laborers show that President Clinton was wrong to say that granting China MFN would improve human rights conditions in China http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N27/china.27w.html.

Revoking MFN is also not subject to sanctions against the US by international trade courts.

Here we go. Should really search first :-) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/cryptnum.htm has some details of Blind Signatures and Double-spending Identification.

Of course, for this you need a government to allow banks to issue secure yet untracable digital cash. I can't imagine it would survive the first round of 'funding terrorism' charges.

People working in the third world building toys aren't (usually) forced to - they do it because it actually improves theirs or their families' lives. And that's been consistently true in every country, from the Philippines to China.

People who refuse to buy from the third world and pay instead for stuff made in developed countries are actually doing much worse to those workers.

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

Here's a link to the pre-published manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/corner-prep.pdf, a related manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/arxivoe.pdf, and a technical report: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/67888

Here's a link to the pre-published manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/corner-prep.pdf, a related manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/arxivoe.pdf, and a technical report: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/67888

Here's a link to the pre-published manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/corner-prep.pdf, a related manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/arxivoe.pdf, and a technical report: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/67888

$32 for an article? Just think, a minimum wage worker has to work for over 4 hours to get access to that. Somehow, I doubt that article is worth it.

Or you could stop whining and spend part of that four hours looking for the paper. It's here.

And I wish you understood that in a developing country (which China is, to a large extent), bad wages are better than no wages.

Yes, that article was written by, that Paul Krugman.

Three education related sites released this year:

1. Sebastian Thrun's udacity.com
2. A combination of univ initiatives @ coursera.org
3. Ted ed

In addition to the programming initiatives at Khan academy and MIT OCW that existed already.
We have dropouts/people who never went to college holding high positions (work with a bunch of such guys on open source projects) Why would people even go to college once this becomes mainstream?

is full of naysayers who lost sight of the true goal of science - to observe, to be open-minded, and honest.
Science should never be wielded like dogma, leave that to religion.
For example:
http://web.mit.edu/randy/www/words.html
Most of these "experts" should have known better, and not gotten cocky with their current state of known science. At no point will we ever know it all. At no point can we say, we know this currently understood law of physics is 100% irrefutable. (Although it' may be 99.9% irrefutable, jus' sayin')

It just may be -however unlikely- that psychic phenomenon is real, but **extremely** rare and not really reproducible -something that can be tapped into on demand- and it's more even probable that most to all psychics are frauds, or at the very least, people who may have experienced some level of ESP once or twice but who greatly overstate their ability as something they can use when they want to, as though it were a reliable tool, a superpower even. Hah.

Of course, on the other hand... it's not good to be so open minded that yer brain falls out. Maybe it's all coincidence.
Either way, bias will always taint this subject, from one end of the argument or the other, but I predict the argument will go on for the foreseeable future.

When police finally had a lead on the BTK serial killer they obtained a sample of a relative's DNA because they didn't have enough evidence to get sample of his. I assume that will become one of the primary uses of New York's database.

Scratch is a development environment that not only is easy to learn, but is free as in beer and speech (as it is open source under the MIT license and CC-by-SA for most documentation and source code). There are also several variants that have been done by people other than MIT that are interesting as well, as it has been around for many years.

While this may be a useful tool, shilling for some group trying to make a quick buck doesn't seem right.

BTW, I agree with people complaining that Slashdot seems to be putting advertisements into the stories themselves. This isn't right and it does diminish what quality is left in the website.

First post to Slashdot
Using slashdot to promote a fee-based service-very sad this actually may be the article that ends my use of Slashdot. Many, many fantastic applications to learn about programming in an array of educational applications are free, have supportive creative communities supportive learning communities around them. Like so many new "featured" stories - this is about helping folks sell products. Nothing more.
Like others are saying - you should take a look at Scratch. Take a look at Python... ( and Slashdot should look at its corporate conscience) whatever - just try them before you head over to a subscription-based service that does 1/2 or more what those other application environments and communities do right now. And are part of the destructive "support" for our public schools. Also look at what master Slashdot is serving with its market positioning service - maybe its got a "do no more evil than google" mission statement now.

Scratch is a development environment that not only is easy to learn, but is free as in beer and speech (as it is open source under the MIT license and CC-by-SA for most documentation and source code). There are also several variants that have been done by people other than MIT that are interesting as well, as it has been around for many years.

While this may be a useful tool, shilling for some group trying to make a quick buck doesn't seem right.

BTW, I agree with people complaining that Slashdot seems to be putting advertisements into the stories themselves. This isn't right and it does diminish what quality is left in the website.

Flywheels, the most efficient means of energy storage we have. Large ones, in sealed units, buried underground like a septic tank, that remain there 50 years or so, and can power your house for week or two in case of outages.

Several companies are working on exactly this.

There's also advances in battery technology. I'm interested in this:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/liquid-batteries-0214.html

The incident with Babble occurred due to the hubris of man (don't kill me for using a Greek term). Maybe they touch on it here, http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-458-the-bible-spring-2007/ although I do not know. And yeah, I know you were attempting a joke, but it is not a very good one: maybe with delivery it could be--plenty of bad jokes are funny because of the joker, but I figure someone might be interested in the MIT link. Don't know how well an engineering institution will pull-off teaching on literature and biblical stuff (mesuspects that some traditionalist--though not fundamentalists, religious organizations would probably do a whole lot better, but again, don't know). Now that I have said all I don't know, I'll have to put that MIT course on my own to-do/listen/watch/whatever list, but it could take a while to get to (stupid priorities).