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I can't help but wonder about the entropy aspect. I mean, you're taking away blackbody radiation and turning it into power at extreme efficiency so that you can get work done all over again. Doesn't that strike anyone else as odd? I mean, let's say that you've got an engine near the Carnot limit and you wrapped it in these IR solar cells, which take 90% of the radiated waste heat and turn it into electricity, when you then use to power an electric motor to boost your engine's output. Would you not have just surpassed the Carnot limit?

Sorry, had to do some quick reading on the Carnot limit. IANA Mech Eng, so my reasoning may be flawed...but here goes

As far as I understand, the Carnot limit is tied to the input and output temperatures of the system. The larger the differential, the higher the theoretical efficiency of 'work' that can be produced by the system. If the solar cells are absorbing and utilizing the 'wasted' heat, aren't they in effect reducing the effective output heat for the engine? In which case, as I understand it, they would be driving up the Carnot limit at the same time, just in a two-stage process. If the recovered energy is then redirected back into the engine (tough, but possible I suppose), well, the effective Carnot limit of the system as a whole has been raised, so we're not breaking any theories of thermodynamics here.

Apologies if I've completely missed the point. Mech and thermodynamics were always my worst classes ;o)

...the universities offered for far less in the 60s...

How can one even say that seriously? (I guess you also feel nostalgic for "myth of past middle-class glory"?)

"Inherently capitalist" is also drive to use the advantage given by... capital. By itself.

Probably not exactly larger [1] - but yes, it is important to note they had the ability to inflict massive destruction... and yet managed to recognize they're broke and dissolve themselves mostly peacefully. I hope we could treat such outcome as a given...

(then there are the myths of bomber gap, missile gap, and mineshaft gap - and how, during and some time after the missile one, Soviets even had a policy of storing warheads and rockets separately; whatever Team B came up with; or one of the greatest historical ironies... Stalin: despite all the victims, a dramatic increase in life expectancy in the area (& generally bringing a very backward and impoverished semi-colonial place up to a status of a superpower - this example of rapid industrialization, and our current comfy world sort of also on the backs of Chinese (plus...), making your ironic point probably much more complex [2]); another irony: yes, strict censorship... but also the first literate generation;
and generally, how the Cold War wasn't very civilised on either side (heck, you have to count the bodies on both, to seriously start pondering...); or how the "evil Russians" probably have a deep need of maintaining buffer states due to foreign armies regularly steam-rolling through their land)

1. Of course, any "demonstration" on either side would most likely cause a full response of the other, so who exactly had a larger stick is a bit moot point.

2. Still a small fry vs. how some of the more radical ideas of "communism" appear out of myths cherished, ironically enough, typically (from what I see) most fervently by the most red-scared parts of society ;> (their "myth of past middle class glory", with a cold look at demographic data, working out pretty much exactly backwards to the cherished ideology :> )

Hey, guys, for a good time, have a look at On Command Video Corp. v. Columbia Pictures Industries, 777 F. Supp. 787 (N.D. Cal. 1991).

On Command was doing literally this exact thing, but 20 years ago and (1) with VCRs instead of DVD players; (2) with the VCRs at the hotel front desk and you in your hotel room, instead of with the DVD players in California and you anywhere on the Internet.

Things did not work out well for On Command. However, the legal landscape has changed somewhat in more recent years -- a more relevant ruling might be the 2008 Cablevision DVR case (see discussion e.g. at http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2008/08/cablevision-wins-on-appeal-remote-dvr-lawful-after-all.ars.

It's even more odd, it would seem (the best part of course: which side of the political spectrum more typically subscribes to this myth and its implications)

...I emphasize good and honest because that is what lacks in today's world. It is easier to lie to an uneducated populous, it is easier to sale crap to unsuspecting people and it is becoming acceptable to look the other way when people cheat on the market. As a society we don;t enforce basic laws or immoral behavior anymore...

Spoiling an ok argument like that... What you describe (& with my emphasis) is the history and pretty much an innate characteristic of human civilization. Of humans. Of us. Demonstrably getting better over the centuries... though still far from optimal of course.

It will have a hard time getting there as long (also) as too many people are repeating to themselves such myths about ourselves and about our past. Not trying to jump over cognitive biases (check their list). Having generally quite poor grip on ourselves: the myth of "monolithic me" while split-brain patients appear almost unchanged, while we are generally closer to our peers than to ourselves at different life stages; only believing how decent memory we have, convincing ourselves about reliability of it, not remembering how little we remember (and how, when people get older, they tend to start believing myths about the greatness of their youth... not the least because it makes us feel better when faced with "frustrating" reality of how much better in fact it is "now", for most cases of "now" - this one gives tiresome political results); there's even one very localised brain trauma which results in people becoming completelly blind... without them realising it; popular harmful BS lies / myth of "we're so important, gods love us, more of us live now than have ever lived!" & ignoring 100+ billion dead homo sapiens sapiens (at least we will be similarly ignored very quickly, so there's some "balance"...)); even about how decent and freedom loving people we are (it's a bit sad how our deep need for Just World gets derailed so easily :/ )

I guess you might also envy the middle-class society from the times when you were born?

Scratch

Are you rational? MAD is not a theory, it is a doctrine, it is the state of your world. The United States and Russia have several thousand thermonuclear weapons they are ready to annhiliate each other with at a moment's notice. A flaw in the engineering of any component in this system is a flaw in the system. It's a system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System
What you don't have is a basic understanding of the functioning of the United States or Russia's strategic warning, communications, command and control, and delivery systems.
Here is a pretty clear reason why MAD is unreasonable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
Here is a list of military research by MIT which includes projects which destabilize the MAD model by introducing the possibility of delivery system defeat: http://web.mit.edu/pugwash/www/milres.html
You did not say it was moral, you said it was for the benefit of humanity.

I read the first blog post and immediately recalled my experience playing with Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/
Looks like almost the exact same approach. My short experience with Scratch suggested that interesting apps could indeed be written in the framework, but that the complexity of any 'real' app would soon become burdensome in such a visual programming environment.

http://web.mit.edu/voodoo/www/degree.gif

No, it couldn't, since http://web.mit.edu/nse/ actually links to www.mitnse.com as their official blog. Its on their homepage, right side.

This is exactly the kind of frothing mouthed paranoia and FUD that needs to stop. Being responsible about reporting doesnt mean youre a shill, and anyone making that claim is part of the problem with the media today, in general. Not everything needs to be sensationalist.

Your sarcasm is ill deserved.

Those reactors are 45 year old technology, took a direct tsunami hit right after an earthquake that was in the top 3 worst ever recorded, exploded, caught fire, and resulted in a grand total of... zero deaths.

Meanwhile, all other forms of cost-effective power generation are much more dangerous, killing far more people than nuclear technology, even including nuclear bombs! For example, the worst dam failure of all time, the Banqiao Dam killed 171K people, about the same number that were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The worst nuclear disaster of all time, Chernobyl, killed only 31 people. For comparison, that's about 0.5% of the deaths attributed to coal mining per year. The United States coal mining industry alone has about the same number of deaths per year as the total deaths due to nuclear power, ever. That number by the way is 40 people. That's like... 3 per decade.

Also, people generally forget that accidents aren't the only source of deaths related to power generation. The United States has gone to war multiple times to protect their interests in oil, leading to several hundred thousand more deaths.

For some reason, people are terrified of the safest form of power generation that is in common use, but have no problem with the US military using Uranium bullets to shoot Iraqi citizens by their thousands.

MIT has OpenCourseWare.

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

Then there is the Khan Academy.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

And Wikipedia, and One Laptop Per Child. People are already working to put all human knowledge online where it can be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the globe.

It depends where you are, but I think degrees mean less when college kids with startups become billionaires. Come up with a good product. Market it well. That is what matters.

Some state laws also specify a tolerance -- sometimes no ticket, sometimes a ticket but no points on your license.

Must burn the oil faster! Product of 3 million years burned in one year - not fast enough! (also...) Must maximize consumption and minimize satisfaction! (nvm how it works out pretty much exactly backwards to cherished ideology)

Requires Windows (tm) 7 (tm) Professional (tm) using an Intel (tm) chipset supporting a Trusted Platform Module (tm) with keys in escrow by the issuing authority.

I thought we'd decided not to reinvent wheels: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x48EE77B1AC94E4B7

OK, all online at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/poker/.

OK, I did some digging in PACER, where it looks like the documents have probably been filed but are probably still sealed.

The relevant case is in the Southern District of New York (https://ecf.nysd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/ShowIndex.pl - anyone can sign up for a PACER account, they're free but you pay 8 cents per page, and if you charge less than $10 in a quarter it's free).

They're using an existing case, 1:10-cr-00336-LAK, which is all about the arrest and indictment of a gambling payment processor dude a year ago in April 2010.

See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/arrests-follow-internet-high-flyers-release/story-e6frg6nf-1226039942478 for more on the dude.

So the timeline is:
1) Gambling dude is arrested in 2010 and charged with some gambling-related crimes. See his indictment at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-lak-1.pdf
2) Some time recently, he is (according to an Australian newspaper) secretly released from prison and prosecutors have not said whether he's still being charged
3) These 11 people are all being charged with 9 new crimes (documents not yet available, but apparently they'll be stored in this place / as part of this case number)

There have been a bunch of sealed documents added to the case recently; maybe they include the complaint and indictment that the press release talks about. You can see the history I got from PACER at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-entries.txt.

OK, I did some digging in PACER, where it looks like the documents have probably been filed but are probably still sealed.

The relevant case is in the Southern District of New York (https://ecf.nysd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/ShowIndex.pl - anyone can sign up for a PACER account, they're free but you pay 8 cents per page, and if you charge less than $10 in a quarter it's free).

They're using an existing case, 1:10-cr-00336-LAK, which is all about the arrest and indictment of a gambling payment processor dude a year ago in April 2010.

See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/arrests-follow-internet-high-flyers-release/story-e6frg6nf-1226039942478 for more on the dude.

So the timeline is:
1) Gambling dude is arrested in 2010 and charged with some gambling-related crimes. See his indictment at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-lak-1.pdf
2) Some time recently, he is (according to an Australian newspaper) secretly released from prison and prosecutors have not said whether he's still being charged
3) These 11 people are all being charged with 9 new crimes (documents not yet available, but apparently they'll be stored in this place / as part of this case number)

There have been a bunch of sealed documents added to the case recently; maybe they include the complaint and indictment that the press release talks about. You can see the history I got from PACER at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-entries.txt.

The Uniform Vehicle Code states "Upon all roadways any vehicle proceeding at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing shall be driven in the right-hand lane then available for traffic..."
 
While this is not 100% applied in every state, this is the generally accepted state of law in most states. Note it does not reference "the legal speed limit" but rather the "normal speed of traffic".
 
Whether a slower driver is in the legal right or not, the slow driver in a fast lane going slower than surrounding traffic will cause traffic jams which are statistically more likely to result in accidents. Additionally, slow drivers blocking the fast lane will cause frustration in drivers attempting to pass slower drivers in the slow lane.
 
This is such an issue that many states have laws requiring drivers to use the fast lane only for overtaking drivers in the slow lane.

A song of most movements of the 80s :p (and earlier) ...not even too strictly about what Gorbachev did. Economic issues were pushing most uprisings behind the Iron Curtain (whatever ideologically-guided people like to believe, and would like us to believe).
Ordinary people simply wanted better pays in relation to rising prices; better benefits, more free days, keeping holiday company funds & assets; they were fed up with some crisis of the moment, when the system was having some hiccups in providing goods and services they were used to, at the cost (to them) they wanted; political postulates were mostly added by "intelligentsia", piggybacking on mass discontent...

...and yes, ironically enough, many former protesters sort of reversed their views, when they got what they "wanted" during political & economic transformation of the 90s - but by then, huge unprofitable workplaces were no longer kept alive by the state, protests directed at the latter couldn't do much.

At least, that's the story of my place (but occasional closer look at neighbors doesn't really challenge it). Also why in Belarus the opposition is so impotent, and why it should remain so for a year or two at least - so far, people at large are content from having bread (and circuses)... which looks like it might change in a year or two. Maybe.

But yes, the irony wasn't about their successes (just "Stalin the murderer" vs. actual demographics; likewise censorship vs. literacy). OTOH about that "free market" and one very rampant in this thread (I doubt there's any point in debunking it...) myth (really good one - similarly, looking just at cold demographic data vs. the "myth of past middle class glory"... how it works out pretty much exactly backwards to the cherished ideology, how "you can use the fact that people did not feel poor in the 1950s as an argument for a more radical egalitarianism than even most leftists would be willing to espouse"); or "land of opportunities" vs. how the US is at the bottom of developed countries in social mobility, how "American Dream" is apparently just another product to sell.

Was this generated by a program using a context free grammar. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Kudos and Erdos for you.

Sounds like a replacement for GEODSS.

GEODSS, from 1980, was the first fully computerized telescope system. It basically looks at the sky, section by section, subtracts out all known objects, and reports the rest. So it finds new satellites, space junk, and even dark objects that occult stars. Three GEODSS sites are still running; a fourth is loaned out to Lincoln Labs to find and track near-Earth asteroids. (Somewhat to the annoyance of astronomers who had been discovering comets and asteroids manually, the automated Lincoln Labs GEODSS discovered them by the thousands.) Each site has at least two identical telescopes, and some have a wide-angle Schmidt.

One of the less-often mentioned features of GEODSS is that it can illuminate a target. One telescope can be used to aim a laser at an object in low orbit, to get a clear picture of darker objects.

English | Geometry | Algebra | Arithmetic

No Latin or Greek...

I'm not talking here about repeating someone else EXPERIMENT I talked about "EVENTS". Especially they tried to "debunk" he Archimedes Syracuse burning mirror attack on ships, and failed in igniting their experimental ships. So they concluded that "EVENT" did not happen. OTOH other research teams had no problems to SET UP an EXPERIMENT that DID IGNITE the target.

I assume you're referring to the MIT experiment, and I have to fight the urge to insult your intelligence. The MIT team used statically positioned mirrors, spent hours trying to focus them on a static target, waited around for clouds to go away, and then eventually got ignition. This doesn't even come close to matching the myth, since a static rig made of modern mirrors carefully aimed at a static target is completely different than hundreds of soldiers shining bronze mirrors on a ship that's bobbing around in the water. If they set out to show that it's possible to use mirrors to start a fire, they succeeded - if their intent was to show that the Archimedes story is true, they failed. They are rightly non-committal in their FAQ since it's clear that the experiment wasn't designed to replicate the actual conditions.

Yes, everyone knows that sunlight can be focused in order to heat up or ignite objects - no, it's not practical to use hand-held mirrors to light an attacking enemy ship on fire. The MIT experiment further confirms the result which the Mythbusters achieved - they showed that it's impractical even under relatively ideal circumstances, let alone under battlefield conditions. The Mythbusters did what they set out to do - they showed that the myth was false. After much criticism they went back, tried the test with some modifications, and again showed that it was false. Clinging to the MIT test as "evidence" that the Archimedes myth might possibly be true is ludicrous.

Research is not about making one single experiment and when it fails concluding "it can't work". Research is about making LOTS of SIMILAR experiments ... If you continuously fail, you try to figure WHY you fail first.

Whenever possible, ideally, sure. It's certainly not an absolute requirement, though, and the number of trials will always be dictated by your budget / time constraints. The Mythbusters generally DO perform multiple trials, they use variations in their experiments to try and simulate different conditions, and they go back and retest some myths when there's cause to do so. On more than one occasion they've retested a myth which they previously "busted", and got positive results on the second run, so they're certainly not hesitant to challenge their previous conclusions and to admit their mistakes when they're identified. If that's not good enough for you ... too damn bad. Make your own TV show if you think you can do better.

BTW: in theory you can not proof the non existing. So proofing Archimdes did NOT ignite with some mirrors (or however) some enemy ships, is impossible by definition ...You can only do two things: repeating experiments until you either be successful or run out of funds. In the later case you only know you failed in doing it, but you still dont know anything about that event.

So by default we must accept that every claim is plausible.

Bullshit. You sound like a goddamn 'psychic'. What people like you don't seem to get is that, in the absence of affirmative evidence, the default rational position is always the rejection of the claim. Otherwise you run into the exact problem which you've detailed above - you waste all your time and money doing experiments, and never get anywhere. You may as well spend all your time jerking-off; it'll be just as productive, and it feels much better. Yes, you're right to the extent that I can never profess 100% certai

>Also reminds me of Robby, the only academic one-name I've ever heard of.

Well there is always Arvind [ http://csg.csail.mit.edu/Users/arvind/ ]

  now you have heard of two

I started my son using Scratch. Its good fun if you are eight years old. But Scratch is just coding by dragging and dropping code. I suppose UML is the visual 'structured collection' thing you are talking about. Managers where I work get bitten by the idea regularly. The projects never actually work though, but I think the problem is the assumptions built into the back end of the UML environment. You pretty much have a to build a back end for every domain.

"One major hurdle to clear: the cost of the analyzers, which go for $10,000 to $40,000 each. " I guess they haven't seen the RF cochlea. That could be developed into something that could be included in every mobile RF device.

In other news, MIT just gained $189 million dollars worth of assets.

A paper on possible failure modes:
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/17748

apparently you're good for about a week even in a worst case *everyone who knows about the plant has suddenly died and all the safety systems have failed at once* scenario.

I also imagine that a direct asteroid strike would be bad for the reactor.

I saw the headline and wondered what in the hell a Chinese phone maker would be doing with word perfect 7 and why it would be news for nerds or stuff that matter. Perhaps they were bringing back envoy, sidekicks or something for advanced functionality. I was excited to see old things made new again and run on hardware about the same power as the original.

Turns out, it's nothing to do with the aging and outdated WP7 at all. It is all about some Microsoft windows creation for phones. Well, seeing how I do not care about windows phone 7, I purpose that before we start reusing abbreviations for products that were available in our life time to mean other products, we stop and thinks is mpw7 or something else might be more efficient in it's understanding. I mean I could start calling everything a DOS or whatever too, but I know it would only confuse people.

You may want to look at Scratch programming environment. While Scratch is a programming tool which lets kids make all sorts of stuff (animations, games, etc), there is a large number of kids who build science simulations with it. For example, you can look at this gallery of physics simulations and animations, all of which were created by kids. Most of the projects on the Scratch website have been created by kids and all projects are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, so kids in your class will be able to download the projects, examine how they have been built, and build their own projects upon existing work.
There is also a website for educators who want to use Scratch - you can ask for ideas and suggestions in the forums in that website.

[Disclaimer: I am a graduate student in the research group which develops Scratch]

You may want to look at Scratch programming environment. While Scratch is a programming tool which lets kids make all sorts of stuff (animations, games, etc), there is a large number of kids who build science simulations with it. For example, you can look at this gallery of physics simulations and animations, all of which were created by kids. Most of the projects on the Scratch website have been created by kids and all projects are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, so kids in your class will be able to download the projects, examine how they have been built, and build their own projects upon existing work.
There is also a website for educators who want to use Scratch - you can ask for ideas and suggestions in the forums in that website.

[Disclaimer: I am a graduate student in the research group which develops Scratch]

You may want to look at Scratch programming environment. While Scratch is a programming tool which lets kids make all sorts of stuff (animations, games, etc), there is a large number of kids who build science simulations with it. For example, you can look at this gallery of physics simulations and animations, all of which were created by kids. Most of the projects on the Scratch website have been created by kids and all projects are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, so kids in your class will be able to download the projects, examine how they have been built, and build their own projects upon existing work.
There is also a website for educators who want to use Scratch - you can ask for ideas and suggestions in the forums in that website.

[Disclaimer: I am a graduate student in the research group which develops Scratch]

The site at http://mitnse.com/ is directly linked from MIT at http://web.mit.edu/nse/newsandmedia/news.html .

Bullshit. If it is malware then the bad guys have also hacked http://www.mit.edu/nse to reference their site. Apparently the MIT nuclear science and engineering dept put up a parallel blog site (mitnse.com) to take the web load.

Your FUD attempt is a bit off, the site is mitnse.com, not the way you spelled it.

The future of nuclear power, if there is any, is something like a pebble bed reactor...

The trouble with pebble bed reactors is that the pebble removal system wears and jams. In most reactors, there are no moving parts inside the reactor vessel other than the control rods. Pebble bed reactors are continuously adding and removing billiard-ball sized "pebbles", making for a much more complex mechanical system within the hot, corrosive and radioactive environment inside the reactor core. The German AVR reactor failed for this reason.

The good thing about pressurized-water reactors is that what's inside the reactor is mechanically simple and uses non-volatile materials. There's no extremely flammable liquid sodium (as in sodium cooled reactors), no liquid fluorine (as in thorium reactors), and no flammable graphite (as at Chernoybl).

"The days of 35mm cameras" might seem as ancient as the dinosaurs to you, but concerns that new technologies and new businesses exploiting of those technologies are infringing on the right "to be let alone" have been raised for more than a century.

Two future Supreme Court of the US Justices, named Warren and Brandeis, published a classic paper entitled "The Right to Privacy" in the Harvard Law Journal in 1890: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html. It is on of the most frequently cited law journal articles of all time and was the first to identify a Constitutional basis for a "right to privacy".

Of course in their day, the new technology was photographs (which were slow back then, but enough faster than paintings that they could be taken surreptitiously) and newspapers were the new business exploiting those technologies but the principles and issues have not changed in a long, LONG time. If you want to read some discussion by a couple of really smart guys about what acts in public deserve privacy, read the paper.

when that nutty computer called out his checkmating line, he gave a suboptimal solution... something no computer chess program would do. Deep Blue must be rolling over in its grave.

Follow Rana El Kaliouby's work -- that's pretty much what her PhD and subsequent research has been on.

to the project's official page.

Oh http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

You may use the left lane (when there is more than one lane in your direction) to pass. You may or may not be able to use the left lane when not passing. The table below describes the law in effect in each state.

A few states permit use of the left lane only for passing or turning left. These have "yes" in the "keep right" column. Six states require drivers to move right if they are blocking traffic in the left lane. Most states follow the Uniform Vehicle Code and require drivers to keep right if they are going slower than the normal speed of traffic (regardless of the speed limit; see below). These are listed as "slower", with an asterisk and an explanation under "comments" if vehicles lawfully using the left lane must yield to overtaking traffic. A few states either do not require vehicles to keep right ("no"), or permit vehicles moving at the speed limit to drive in the left lane regardless of traffic conditions ("SL").

The color coding in the "keep right" column is red if the state has no restriction on slow vehicles in the left lane, yellow if vehicles moving at the normal speed of traffic are permitted in the left lane even when they are unnecessarily obstructing other traffic, green if use of the left lane is limited to passing, and grey otherwise.

... MIT cheetah pic here ...

Hollywood's envisioning: http://www.explore-science-fiction-movies.com/amee-red-planet.html

-1 Knows Nothing About Robotics.

Hi, roboticist here. Let me just say 'citation needed' to pretty much everything the parent said. I'm not quite sure what a "sense of instability and correction mechanisms" is, but I'm guessing they mean "sensors and control systems", but I'm pretty sure dynamic stability, traction, motion sensing and control have little to do with conformal surface coverings. Yes, skin has important traction characteristics, and flesh has inherent compliance that is important in gait cycles, but skin has nothing to do with dynamic stability.

Further more, it is fallacious to say that researchers aren't developing skin. That's simply false - there are many benefits to synthetic skin to be derived from users of prosthetic appliances, both in contact mechanics and sensing. There have been some very novel products in that area... they just don't happen to apply to dynamic control of legged robots.

Given the parent's mention of Big Dog and the weight of mechanical structures, I'd like to point out that part of the work for cheetah includes exploring composite structures for legged robots that will decrease total weight and rotational inertia of the limbs - directly related to the maximum speed at which a legged robot can move. Cf. the sexy MIT cheetah pic here. Note the call-outs citing sensors, balance mechanisms, traction control, actuators and distinct lack of skin.

It doesn't have to be - MIT is doing nice stuff with their opencourseware. Of course, that's not as interesting to the masses as re-shooting the Harper Valley PTA TV series would be.

aaaaa ooooo ok but are they less incompetent or what?

This is a Kerberos (server side) issue affecting vendors shipping Kerberos, not an Ubuntu specific issue. All 4 of the issues are denial of service only (which is bad for authentication infrastructure since you can basically prevent everyone from getting any work done). Nothing to get terribly worked up about.

http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/kerberos/www/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2011-001.txt

http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/kerberos/www/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2011-002.txt

This is a Kerberos (server side) issue affecting vendors shipping Kerberos, not an Ubuntu specific issue. All 4 of the issues are denial of service only (which is bad for authentication infrastructure since you can basically prevent everyone from getting any work done). Nothing to get terribly worked up about.

http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/kerberos/www/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2011-001.txt

http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/kerberos/www/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2011-002.txt

It is MIT Kerberos, so yes. This came out last week.

http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2011-002.txt

Well, metaphorical desktop metaphor aside, Tangible media is about finding new ways to interact with a computer. One of the most interesting tangible media interfaces I've seen is Siftables. Siftables are computers about the size of a cookie that interact with each other. They sense when other siftables are set beside them. You can manipulate the computer by shuffling around the siftables like blocks. They have tilt sensors so that you can "pour" the effect of one siftable into another. The desktop metaphor has stood for a long time, and it is good for a lot of things. However, might there not be a better way to manipulate, say sound, than by clicking with a mouse?