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So, basically they're working on an advanced (or, if you feel you must call it this way, "overcomplicated") version of MIT's Random Hall Laundry Server? Are we going to see an advanced version of the Bathroom Server next?

So, basically they're working on an advanced (or, if you feel you must call it this way, "overcomplicated") version of MIT's Random Hall Laundry Server? Are we going to see an advanced version of the Bathroom Server next?

You are wrong. If original 1997 disclosure the technology required, new claims can be written later so long as there is a co-pending continuation of the original filing.

First, it's obvious that there was prior art for the patent as described, when it was filed in 2008.

Second, even if Planetall used a unique and patentable invention in 1998, it cannot be patented with an application filed in 2008. Here's a descriptive quote from the MIT Technology Licensing Office:

The U.S. patent law system is among the most lenient in the world with regards to prior disclosure of your invention. It allows you to publish your invention or offer it for sale prior to filing a patent application, provided that you file your patent application within one year of the publication or offer for sale. If you wait longer than one year, your patent rights are forfeited. The one-year period is a "grace period." - MIT-TLO

The U.S. patent law system is among the most lenient in the world with regards to prior disclosure of your invention. It allows you to publish your invention or offer it for sale prior to filing a patent application, provided that you file your patent application within one year of the publication or offer for sale. If you wait longer than one year, your patent rights are forfeited. The one-year period is a "grace period." - MIT-TLO

A more important property of the brain is that it is not as precise as a computer. The brain, and many other biological computations, perform their calculations in an analog manner that usually gets them "close enough" to the right answer. Digital designers think they need every bit of precision in a 64-bit floating point computation and they engineer the circuit to require it--this involves a lot of "over engineering." Of course, the really cool thing is that biology has "digital" circuits as well, when it needs it!

I'm not really an expert, I've just attended a lecture by Prof. Sarpeshkar at MIT. He's built some cool DSP devices modeled after the human ear. He has a new (text)book, "Ultra Low Power Bioelectronics: Fundamentals, Biomedical Applications, and Bio-inspired Systems."

It's really fascinating stuff, and I think is where low-power computation is really going to go: into a hybrid analog-digital domain. Subthreshold is cute in SPICE, but process variation is a huge barrier to using it on any kind of microprocessor or SoC sized chip.

How about a levitated dipole design?

Not all areas have pay-to-play open-access journals. In my area, JAIR and JMLR are probably the two most prestigious journals (not just most prestigious open-access journals, but most prestigious period), and they're both entirely open access and entirely free of publication fees.

They're rarely enforced, but almost every state has laws for "slower traffic keep right" or "left pane for passing only".
http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

In California, it specificically states "Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits" in CVC 21654(a). Even if you are already driving faster than the speed limit, drivers must yield the left lane to traffic that's moving faster.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/media-arts-and-sciences/mas-863-how-to-make-almost-anything-fall-2002/index.htm

Tinfoil hats actually amplify government mind control rays! Putting on tinfoil hats is exactly what they want you to do! ;)

typo schmipo. the search engine can figure it out.

anyway this is the direct link you are really looking for:

National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films

• http://web.mit.edu/hml/ncfmf.html

In 1961, Ascher Shapiro founded the National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films (NCFMF) in cooperation with the Education Development Center and released a series of 39 videos and accompanying texts which revolutionized the teaching of fluid mechanics. MIT's iFluids program has made a number of the films from this series available on the web. (Realplayer is required.

It's not just Microsoft. OSX defaults to autologin too:

http://ist.mit.edu/services/software/macosx/security
http://www.rit.edu/its/services/desktop_support/mac/xdisableautomaticlogin.html

OSX is NOT more secure from a technical POV.

But it is more secure the way a house with no locks in a small village is more secure than a locked apartment in a big bad city.

Heh Apple even do silly stuff like: http://www.fuzzydice.net/?tag=macintosh-osx-linux-telnet-auto-login

The only time I've ever had to 'sudo' was when I was running a socket on port 80.

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port...

There was a really interesting talk I saw a few years back about Failure-Oblivious Computing (original paper (PDF), Google PDF viewer) which would deal with certain kinds of memory errors, like reading or writing past the end of a buffer, by ignoring them and moving on. For reads, if the program tried to read from a bad address, the system would figure out something random to return, and if you tried to write out of bounds, rather than throwing and exception (or segfaulting), it would just ignore the extra writes. This sounds horrifying and seems like it could not possibly work, but it turned out that for (certain kinds of) mostly-correct programs, they could literally ignore errors and things would mostly work.

I can't find a link for it now, but towards the end of the talk, they stress-tested the failure-oblivious compiler by manually introducing off-by-one errors into the source code and seeing what happened. They tried this with a video codec, and found that certain loop bounds were essential for things like determining branch targets, but that a significant number could be fudged and you would still end up with a recognizable video. Obviously, it was degraded from full working order, but you could still make out what was happening in the picture.

The point being that there are certain kinds of faults which a program can tolerate (slightly inaccurate pixel colors, minor graphical garbling of text or images), and there are faults which it cannot (like figuring out a branch target).

I doubt the whole world will move to highly fault-tolerant or failure-oblivious computing any time soon, but it could be an interesting niche for a coprocessor, and/or in certain domains.

MIT's webpage on iconoclasm http://fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu/ prominently displayed this image for years with little uproar.

That image is truly orders of magnitude more insulting than anything any cartoonists have come up with of mohammed.

Where is the parity here? Are all christians just quitet duds? Freedom of press does not mean you have to accept any insult with no comment.

Comments welcome.

Scratch.

If he has any interest in creating something (game, interactive story, animation, etc.) it might be worth having him check out "Scratch" from MIT.

My pre-teens have played with it a bit - it can be pretty fun, and one can see how it introduces a lot of coding thoughts.

http://scratch.mit.edu/

"Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. ...."

The following has been useful in a classroom setting: http://scratch.mit.edu/

Depending on his skill level and interest, I would try Squeak. Scratch and Etoys work well with younger kids.

Someone else said you can't force someone to program. I agree with that, but people don't always know what they're going to like. Give him things to explore and maybe he will become interested. Try not to be offended if he doesn't.

The GPL doesn't require that hardware that has GPL code be modifiable to include updated versions of code. Build systems are a distraction here: a more direct form of the problem is that the GPL code is burned into ROM, and even the GPLv3's Tivoization section (number 6, paragraph starting "If you convey...") explicitly permits that. It would be dumb if it didn't. While it may well be the case that for GPLv3 (and not GPLv2) failing to give you a usable build environment for compiling modifying code so you can run it on your "User Product" is a violation, this is forgetting a large part of the purpose of free software.

The point of free software is that the software, the code, is free for the community to use. Thinking about free software as simply the ability to modify code within its original context causes us to forget opportunities for reusability that benefit the entire free software community, well past the lifetime of this one device, and encourages behavior where modified code isn't usable on other devices or in entirely different contexts. I've written a bit more about this on my blog, with some examples of times when thinking about "free software"/"open source" only within the context of the original product has caused the free software ecosystem as a whole — the thing that's causing large companies to want to embed free software in their hardware devices in the first place — to be left behind.

It has been literally a decade since I last talked to uncle Mike the farmer about this. I have since been under the false assumption that Monsanto went through with it. But thanks dude, it's not every day I find myself refreshingly wrong.

Here's the best article I could find on the topic. You have to get all the way to the bottom before hearing how Monsanto backed off due to political pressure.
Of course, the wiki page also spells it out. And apparently some people simply get it wrong.
I believe that this would approach an urban legend against a megacorp.

In 1997, I saw Al Gross talk at the Vehicular Technology Conference about his history in designing portable radios. He claimed that Dick Tracy author Chester Gould got the idea for the wrist radio from an actual prototype that he had been building (following on from his successful radio designs for the military). It's a very long feedback loop.

Imagination and pixie dust. That is what makes them so light and durable.

From TFA:

The researchers acknowledge that some propulsion system technology still needs to be explored.

There already are Open textbooks. There are numerous sites where they are indexed, catalogued, advertised and - yes - sold in bound printed formats, collections and whatnot. As you note, there are many print houses that will print a run of books, and their prices can be much more reasonable than buying from traditional publishers. Because YOU are in control of the content, you can order as many or as few as you want. Paperbacks? Books on CD? Another 800 of last year's run? No problem. This breaks the "forced update" model where a school district has to landfill and reorder new books every second year because of spurious "revised editions". Many open textbooks are quite good. They go all the way up to the nearly 2,000 college level courses in MIT OpenCourseWare and beyond. Because the books are free to download, the teachers can choose from a broad selection appropriate to your local culture.

This stuff will sort itself out sooner or later.

I'm hoping that one day soon kids just get their K-16 curriculum on an SDHC card or whatever media is common when they show up at Kindergarten and if they finish it before their education allotment runs out then more power to 'em. I never saw the value in attendance and peer-synchronous education. School is not daycare. Kids are all different. In a normal distribution the fast achievers can save the state money and time that can be used to help those who struggle, and incidentally achieve the accomplishments our future needs from them.

That's okay. There's a trick for that shit too.

Not "more than two legs", animals with 6 legs don't need to adjust their movements because if they only move 3 legs at a time, they are always inherently stable. Animals with 2 legs, and to a lesser extent animals with 3, 4, or 5 legs (depending on gait), do need to adjust their movement for different terrains to avoid falling over. Yes, if you are going to build a "walking" robot for harsh terrain, 6 legs appears to me to be the way to go. One legged robots -- not so much.

Why can't we admit that not everyone gets to be a fashion model, a football star, or a CEO?

Well you have a bunch of rich workaholic CEOs running things, and they go around telling everyone that rich workaholic CEOs are the only valuable people in the world and everyone else is a useless piece of crap. Surprise!

One of the problems a culture who believes that "capitalism" is an ethical/moral system rather than simply an economic system. For example:

I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it.

If "wages represent the value that a worker provides to others", then implicitly no one can ever be underpaid or under-appreciated. Rich people are rich because they're good people who deserve all that life has to offer. If a garbage man or janitor is poor and suffering, it must be that he is a bad and worthless person who isn't contributing anything to society.... right?

Yeah, so that really sucks, but that belief system persists, largely because the rich and powerful are egocentric enough to actually believe that they deserve everything they've gotten, as well as being powerful enough push that belief system into our culture as an absolute truth.

Is how effective Tin foil might be at stopping the hallucinations. They haven't stopped since I started wearing my hat, I'm beginning to doubt they are hallucinations like my doctor tells me.

"They" claim that tinfoil helmets don't really work: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

Which should have been included into TFA from the start:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/leozhu/paper/RCM10cvpr.pdf
The main achievement claimed is that no image labeling or any additional data like viewport position was needed, the learning process was completely automated.

No, because it doesn't.

Upper paleolithic european cave art used continuous, flowing lines, created by spit-painting (think prehistoric mouth airbrush), not short, overlapping, straight lines. The system described in TFA produces results that resemble the sort of lame, pseudo-cubist drawing one saw in art schools in the mid 20th c.

This only goes so far of course. It's based on a model in which both armies are engaged for the entire duration of the fight. If technology allows one army to strike the other from a distance with impunity, then the model does break.

"All warfare is based on deception" - Sun Tzu

"Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre, the more a general contributes in manoeuvre the less he demands in slaughter" - Winston Churchill.

Technology or numbers ultimately do not win wars. It's tactics and strategy that wins wars and in this respect we (all western nations, the collective "we" as I'm not a yank) are failing horribly in. It's no good fighting the enemy on paper.

Give the Art of War a read if you haven't already. Most of it still rings true today. The first 20 stanzas outline the keys to victory. This one is most important one is:

12. Therefore, in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this wise:--

13. (1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral law? (2) Which of the two generals has most ability? (3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth? (4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced? (5) Which army is stronger? (6) On which side are officers and men more highly trained? (7) In which army is there the greater constancy both in reward and punishment?

1. Which side believes itself to be most right and will act in complete accordance with a leaders decision, Sun Tzu calls this "the Moral Law" but we'll use the modern term, "Morale".
2. Which general is most capable, coming up with unique strategies and adapting to changes on the battlefield.
3. Then are environmental conditions, rain/snow, higher ground and so forth.
4. Which side has better discipline.
5. Now we have an armies strength.
The whole chapter is worth reading, just don't get hung up on the meanings of words like "Moral" when applying it to your enemies. The book was written by a Taoist 2000 years ago and translated by an Englishman 100 years ago, some things are bound to get lost in translation so use context.

Remember that the NVA/Vietcong ultimately forced the US to withdraw not out of superior technology or superior numbers but by superior tactics, they kept the front well supplied, were able to use the land to their advantage, unique attacks that had circumvented existing defence doctrines.

There's a study recently released from MIT that outlines an early life stage DNA in molecule sized fossils found in ancient rocks. Perhaps the MIT folks can look at the Mars asteroids for evidence of molecules that imply life encoding DNA. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/gene-fossils-0506.html

The League for Programming Freedom advocated something like this in 1994: "Mutual Defense Against Software Patents."

On any road with multiple lanes, especially freeways, the leftmost lane is meant to be a fast passing lane. Proper behavior is to use it to overtake then return to a more rightward lane as soon as you reasonably can.

Thanks for calling me a moron, but do you have any facts to back that up?

I do understand that this is the etiquette, but I disagree that the state would pour asphalt lanes with the expressed intent of someone using them to violate the law.

Now, you're likely correct when the highways are four total lanes divided by some yellow paint. The risk of going over the line is too great when oncoming traffic is only a few feet away. But then I specifically said 'interstate', didn't I?

yes it has http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html

are you so sure of that MIT has done it http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html

Are chimps that similar to humans? Scientists have measured only mitochondrial DNA before to claim "99.9% similarity" between organisms, and that because this is DNA, it is indisputable truth. But then, if we apply the same standard to Y chromosomes, then chimps and humans are only about 50-66% similar, depending on the metric used.

http://www.wi.mit.edu/news/archives/2010/dp_0113.html

And as MIT says, the chimpanzee is only the second Y chromosome to be comprehensively analyzed. Are you going to say for sure that orangutans are less related?

"HIV is relatively new. What is old are precursor viruses such as SIV (the version for apes) and FIV (the version for cats)."

But then, SIV and FIV were discovered only after HIV. I remember back then when scientists used to say that only primates can catch AIDS.

you realize that MIT isn't a "company"?

This page begs to differ. MIT is a non-profit corporation.

Besides, you don't even NEED keyservers for the system to function.

Without keyservers, how would you follow the signature chain in order to verify that the public key that you're using to encrypt a message actually belongs to the recipient?

Lots of working models. Even some you can build.

The problem is that everyone focused on hydrogen because they sorted that energy density page by mass, not by volume. It's a very poor fuel. People are too focused on hydrogen IMHO. The best and cheapest methods so far considered to store hydrogen (reacting water with metal) all lead to the conclusion that metals are better. The fact that people have made metal air cells in their house that actually power things also shows that they are better.

Metal-air batteries work, and so does electrolysis to regenerate the batteries. The problem most of the companies I've seen so far hit has been the process of pumping the solid fuels ("pumping iron"). I'm a highschool student, so don't take my word for it. I'm also a roboticist, and so I think that if I can get the chemistry working, I can build robots to deal with fuel handling.

Me thinks that the "researchers" need to research a little more... http://www.answers.com/topic/trespass http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall97-papers/kim-crime.html

I wish I could mod you +1 funny, Daisy can put her shoes by my laptop anytime. But I was thinking something more like this, or this.

'Duinos rock, especially if you have some computer background!!

The other place that might be of interest is this course from MIT's open courseware...it's also available through the iTunes U if that floats your boat! It is likely a little more theory than you are after at the moment, but it might be helpful/useful after getting your feet wet.

I personally have dove in and am only slightly ahead of you by picking up things online (case modding taught me a bit), and now that I consider myself a maker, there have been numerous times I have had a problem I wished to solve electronically and a few well placed google searches later I had enough of an answer to get something working.

Oh yeah, with the arduino's there are a tonne of resources available out there...I have gotten started with info from Lady Ada and this book

I'd strongly suggest that you do at least a basic level of looking into theory while you're creating "practical circuits" - it's quite helpful when you're debugging to know at least roughly what's meant to happen.

One source I can recommend is the MIT Open Courseware resources - the 6.002 course on Circuits and Electronics is a good place to start; I'm an embedded software engineer who's started to push into the hardware side of things, and that set of lectures helped me turn my vague understanding of electronics (being able to read a circuit and understand what's going on) into something practical (being able to design a circuit).

Press release stories like this should get a special Slashdot category - something like scientific vaporware. While this is potentially an important discovery, none of the information needed to determine if this could ever be an energetically or economically viable way of producing hydrogen is provided.

Agreed. Providing proper context is 100% of the difference between scientific sensationalism and good science journalism. FYI, the original press MIT press release does include such context information, which TFA conveniently left out. http://web.mit.edu/press/2010/virus-water

Thomas Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in this work, says, “This is an extremely clever piece of work that addresses one of the most difficult problems in artificial photosynthesis, namely, the nanoscale organization of the components in order to control electron transfer rates.” He adds: “There is a daunting combination of problems to be solved before this or any other artificial photosynthetic system could actually be useful for energy conversion.” To be cost-competitive with other approaches to solar power, he says, the system would need to be at least 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis, be able to repeat the reaction a billion times, and use less expensive materials. “This is unlikely to happen in the near future,” he says. “Nevertheless, the design idea illustrated in this paper could ultimately help with an important piece of the puzzle.”

Speaking of Erik Demaine, he has an excellent algorithms course on OCW: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-046JFall-2005/VideoLectures/

Well worth watching on video!

Some of the lectures (such as the first one) are by Leiserson, but Demaine's are a treat.

I'll mention it to my publisher, but honestly it would lose a lot without all the color figures.

The book is based on my Ph.D. thesis, which you can download for free:

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/hearn-thesis-final.pdf

Please editors... at least link to the original press release if not the research paper.

What's the point of linking to other blogs that have crappy internal links all over the article?

There you go...

http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html (check the gallery)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit

You don't really need insulation from "cold" and vacuum - human skin is already great for those; it's almost impenetrable to gasses, and "cold" isn't the same kind of problem as in the atmoshpere (because there's no direct heat exchange) - after all, vacuum is a pretty good heat insulator (thermos...), so you have to worry mostly about overheating...and skin has great mechanism to deal with that (+ the suit being bright so it won't get too hot in sunlight). Radiation...well, shield for that can be a loose, external (even separate) layer.

The only major thing human skin lacks is mechanical rigidity; it expands in a vacuum, causing internal pressure of the body to drop. Well, suits from above links combat that expansion by providing mechanical pressure required.

And BTW some people are working on space suit (proper) technology which does end up looking rather fashionable; relying on the obserbation that human skin is already a pretty good "space suit", except for providing mechanical pressure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit
http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html

PS. Definatelly provides an argument to my views that, while there really isn't something like too little breasts, there is something like "too big" ones - seems they have some some chance of being containing to Earth and dying out once we set for the stairs ;p

There is nothing terrible about this decision, because this decision has nothing to do with net neutrality. It was a decision about whether a government agency has carte blanche to do whatever the hell it wants without any congressional oversight, much less voter oversight.

And since when is an agency regulating what it was meant to--not what consumers are allowed, but the level of service offered to the the consumer--government by executive order? Broad strokes to say the FCC would have "carte blanche", and even if they did in this regard, so what? It's not as if this would give the FCC some outlandish power to "regulate the internet" and force ISPs to filter certain information or somesuch. How could any consumer be harmed by such regulation when the targeted entities are corporations, not consumers? In a market as consolidated as the US, it's quite the opposite--the consumer's vulnerable without such regulation. I'd listen to the man who created the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, on the matter: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144

We do NOT want government by executive order.

An executive order? I wish.. Obama spoke about net neutrality when he was running, but the issue was seemingly dropped from his roster of concerns.