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It would seem to me if every citizen knew how to properly shoot a rifle, odds are pretty good one of those things could be knocked out of the sky with a barrett. It would cost all of us a heck of a lot less money too. In fact... this is exactly the sort of thing the 2nd amendment was written for. "The people" defending themselves from attack.

Look, I'm a strong proponent of the 2nd Amendment, and a licensed concealed-carry instructor to boot. And having a bunch of citizens attempt to shoot down a drone is simply a BAD IDEA. What goes up must come down, no? Every year on the 4th of July, some idiot kills a completely innocent bystander because he decided to shoot up in the air, not realizing that the bullets have to land somewhere. Instead, we'd be better off looking at taking airborne missile-defense laser weapons and adapting them to ground-based installations. Of course, these drones are small, fast, and stealthy, so we would probably have to include a system to find the drones in real-time and link that system to the ground-based air defense. We'd still have to worry about legitimate air-traffic, and depending upon the strength of the lasers, possibly objects in low-earth-orbit. But while it would probably be way too expensive a solution to put into place, it would be way more safe than a bunch of us gun-owners trying to shoot down a drone!

Heaven forbid that you double check the facts. Not to mention that there is no worldwide measure of the quality/accuracy of any academic papers released.

You're right. There are hundreds of crap conferences. The World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, is particularly notorious. They accepted both, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, and my personal favorite, David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler's seminal work, Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List. So let's just limit ourselves to a top conferences, shall we?

SIGIR is the top information retrieval conference in the world. The acceptance rate was 16% last year, which makes it an "extremely selective" conference in the research world. The acceptance rate has held around 15% - 17% for decades now, and in fact tended decrease as the number of submissions have increased. It accepts submission from worldwide and from both academia and industry.

This analsys from 2007 of papers over the previous 30 years shows that China has moved into 5th overall in number of accepted papers. This is in no small part to Microsoft Research Asia.

So yeah, there are a lot of people just copying stuff around, but there's also a lot of people actually doing extremely good work. You're a fool if you fail to recognize this do your jingoism and racism.

The Unicode standard is 18 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?

Because it's an English site. ASCII supports every character required.

The California legislature are just not familiar with the problem.

In any case, everyone can feel free to use this handy guide to help avoid foul language:
http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/humor/avoid-foul-language

The conditions on Enceladus are believed to be short lived.

Where are you getting that from? Why would its tidal force heating have been less in the past?

There have been many articles which try to explain the gap in the known energy input from tidal heating and the known energy output of the plumes. This PDF suggests that we are now seeing energy released from a recent period when the orbital eccentricity was higher and the moon absorbed more heat. The upshot seems to be that current conditions are temporary and can't be used to model the entire history of the moon.

What biologists tend to pidgeon-hole as "life" is a sub-set of the wider computational process' in our Universe. How do we get from obviously non-living molecules up to these wonderful structures we call people who morally appreciate beauty? Well, it's all compuation and the devil is in the details: see Figure 1 of The Computational Beauty of Nature. The book both begins and ends with that figure - to reinforce the relationships in the deepest depths of our Universe. The philosophy when scaled up to our noble and good level of reality works smoothly the entire way. Recognition that the Universe, Biology, and Evolution are all Computational is just taking time to work it's way through the teaching material.

What biologists tend to pidgeon-hole as "life" is a sub-set of the wider computational process' in our Universe. How do we get from obviously non-living molecules up to these wonderful structures we call people who morally appreciate beauty? Well, it's all compuation and the devil is in the details: see Figure 1 of The Computational Beauty of Nature. The book both begins and ends with that figure - to reinforce the relationships in the deepest depths of our Universe. The philosophy when scaled up to our noble and good level of reality works smoothly the entire way. Recognition that the Universe, Biology, and Evolution are all Computational is just taking time to work it's way through the teaching material.

MIT already did that three years ago, albeit in smaller scale.

project site: http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnEN9B18v6Q

In my experience the biggest problems are caused by self-taught programmers who lack the humility to realize that computer science and computing a large field, in which they are not domain experts of all of it. Seriously, I'm saying this not to be an insult, but as a plea for self-taught programmers to take their blinders off, and admit to themselves there is a lot of knowledge about computer science and computing (or IT), which has a rich if relatively short history. The ones who get pass the chip-on-their-shoulder defense often become very good to great programmers. The ones who don't tend to become isolated, confrontational, unable to handle constructive feedback or criticism, and tend to be poor team players.

The other big weakness they can have, is they seem more apt to have problem with NIH-syndrome (not invented here). Anything they didn't do or create is crap. Again this seems to be a self-defense mechanism gone astray.

If these two psychological factors are dealt with, the technical knowledge gaps are in comparison trivial to deal with.

In your case, exposure to higher education including post secondary mathematics, helps with the building the experience of abstract thinking which is a excellent trait or training for programmers, to deal with programming in both the concrete and abstract terms.

A programmer who knows and understands the fundamentals of computer science, including data structures, algorithms, number systems, boolean logic, at least a basic understanding of computer architecture in my experience tends to be more flexible and adaptable to change in computing / IT in general as well as able to less stressful to change development environments including languages. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Structured Computer Organization, and Introduction to Algorithms are excellent resources for any self-taught programmer looking to fill gaps in the knowledge.

Also professional computing / IT society memberships might be worth considering (especially if your employer will pick up the tab), for example the ACM, and the IEEE Computer Society. Both have a bent towards academia, but they largely due to the self-interest of authors in academia to publish (for their own career success), as opposed to a conscience focus away from the "real-world" programming in the trenches.

For any new professional programmer, texts like The Pragmatic Programmer, Code Complete, Peopleware, and The Mythical Man-Month are strongly recommended reading matieral.

In my experience the biggest problems are caused by self-taught programmers who lack the humility to realize that computer science and computing a large field, in which they are not domain experts of all of it. Seriously, I'm saying this not to be an insult, but as a plea for self-taught programmers to take their blinders off, and admit to themselves there is a lot of knowledge about computer science and computing (or IT), which has a rich if relatively short history. The ones who get pass the chip-on-their-shoulder defense often become very good to great programmers. The ones who don't tend to become isolated, confrontational, unable to handle constructive feedback or criticism, and tend to be poor team players.

The other big weakness they can have, is they seem more apt to have problem with NIH-syndrome (not invented here). Anything they didn't do or create is crap. Again this seems to be a self-defense mechanism gone astray.

If these two psychological factors are dealt with, the technical knowledge gaps are in comparison trivial to deal with.

In your case, exposure to higher education including post secondary mathematics, helps with the building the experience of abstract thinking which is a excellent trait or training for programmers, to deal with programming in both the concrete and abstract terms.

A programmer who knows and understands the fundamentals of computer science, including data structures, algorithms, number systems, boolean logic, at least a basic understanding of computer architecture in my experience tends to be more flexible and adaptable to change in computing / IT in general as well as able to less stressful to change development environments including languages. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Structured Computer Organization, and Introduction to Algorithms are excellent resources for any self-taught programmer looking to fill gaps in the knowledge.

Also professional computing / IT society memberships might be worth considering (especially if your employer will pick up the tab), for example the ACM, and the IEEE Computer Society. Both have a bent towards academia, but they largely due to the self-interest of authors in academia to publish (for their own career success), as opposed to a conscience focus away from the "real-world" programming in the trenches.

For any new professional programmer, texts like The Pragmatic Programmer, Code Complete, Peopleware, and The Mythical Man-Month are strongly recommended reading matieral.

I wish we had this from MIT when I was in school. http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/ Strang, Lewin and others are really good teachers UCLA and Stanford also have on line courses.

While I don't disagree with you in principle, you're wrong in fact. A little Shakespeare will show it plainly:

PARIS

        But now, my lord, what say you to my suit?

CAPULET

        But saying o'er what I have said before:
        My child is yet a stranger in the world;
        She hath not seen the change of fourteen years,
        Let two more summers wither in their pride,
        Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.

PARIS

        Younger than she are happy mothers made.

CAPULET

        And too soon marr'd are those so early made.
        The earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she,
        She is the hopeful lady of my earth:

Romeo & Juliet

In short, people have never thought marrying at 14 a great idea. 16, on the other hand, we see Capulet/Shakespeare finds quite a good age for a girl to marry. And that's when we're suggesting we send some to college, so things haven't changed all that much.

usually to efficently leverage ethanol you have to have an engine designed for it. You can utilize VASTLY higher compression ratios with ethanol, because of it's massive antiknock rating. So you use a turbo, superhigh compression ratios, and boom, ethanol comes within 10-20% as efficent as gasoline. This allows you to use a smaller engine, and hence less pumping losses, opening the door for ethanol engines to surpass gasoline engines in MPG efficency. How about using ethanol in combination with gasoline to drastically boost normal fuel efficency by achieving higher compression ratios than normally possible? http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/engine.html This MIT engine uses ethanol injection to keep an engine from knocking, delivering significantly higher compression ratios. About 1 gallon of ethanol to 20 galons of gasoline used. And the result? Engine output per liter jumped nearly 2x. Thus, overall fuel efficency gains were in the neighborhood of 20-30%, and I doubt it'd be that much more expensive than a hybrid system. Combined with a hybrid system, this could allow stratospheric mileages easily toppling diesel in 1st place. I think so far this is only on simulations, but if it were to break into the market, Ethanol could find it's home not only as an alternative fuel, but more importantly boosting the efficency of all of the other straight gasoline engines out there. All it takes is customized design for the fuel application.

Check out the work on Genghis by Maes and Brooks (Learning to Coordinate Behaviors):

Here's the abstract of the paper:

We describe an algorithm which allows a behavior-based robot to learn on the basis of positive and negative feedback when to activate its behaviors. In accordance with the philosophy of behavior-based robots, the algorithm is completely distributed: each of the behaviors independently tries to find out (i) whether it is relevant (ie. whether it is at all correlated to positive feedback) and (ii) what the conditions are under which it becomes reliable (i.e. the conditions under which it maximizes the probability of receiving positive feedback and minimizes the probability of receiving negative feedback). The algorithm has been tested successfully on an autonomous 6-legged robot which had to learn how to coordinate its legs so as to walk forward.

Yup, published in AAAI almost 20 years ago.

"The algorithm has been tested successfully on an autonomous 6-legged robot which had to learn how to coordinate its legs so as to move forward."

typo in link
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and-MagnetismSpring2002/VideoAndCaptions/detail/embed35.htm @ 8 min 40 seconds

First, The universe is, on a large scale uniform. That basically means the sky will look the same in any telescope: Black with white dots. That in itself in an important fact worth seeing, but quite boring.

Second, The images on Google Sky and other all star surveys have spoiled us, and we all expect spectacular full color images. What you actually see will never meet this. Expect some disappointment.

With expectations set, I would focus on what is not uniform: First tie it all in with Google earth, and history from a geocentric to a heliocentric view. Look at what Galileo looked at from our moon to the Jovian moons, and how this changed mankind.

Look at some galaxies, and find one that looks like ours. Again combine with Google Sky.

Also use the telescope to look at our star, the sun: Aim the telescope at the sun, and project the image onto the wall. DO NOT LOOK INTO THE TELESCOPE. You should have a 2 meter diameter projection of our sun on the wall. Features like sunspots should be clear and sharp.
Depending on time and class:
1. Use the 'scope and a green laser to measure distance to moon.
2. Measure redshift of nearby galaxies see http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and-MagnetismSpring2002/VideoAndCaptions/detail/embed35.htmconvertingredshiftintoradialvelocity
3. Use as an accurate sextant, measure size of earth
4. Track IIS and satellites
5. Do a parallax calculation using some nearby stars. Picking good candidates are part of the exercise.

I would go further than just publishing the code used in scientific research. I would build the code by running it a real open source project. In fact, I've done exactly that, and it worked out incredibly well. I believe our open source approach lead to better science, and also better software.

I worked with researchers from MIT and Columbia on a research project that involved gathering and analyzing a large amount of publication data. The results of the study are about to be published (you can read the working paper at the lead researcher's website).

We intended the code for this project to be released from the beginning, so we ran it as an open source project. I followed the basic formula from Karl Fogel's excellent (and free to download) book, Producing Open Source Software: set up a website for the project, created lots of documentation, tried to make it as easy as possible for someone to get up and running, made the source available via Subversion, and made it easy to contact us.

Quality was really important for us, so we put a lot of effort into testing. I definitely believe that the fact that we intended the project to be open source from the beginning helped with that. We weren't treating the code as some piece of throwaway or replaceable lab equipment. I'm convinced that treating it as a real product of the research caused us to take the development and the quality much more seriously than a lot of researchers. I've since heard from other researchers who are starting to use the software as well, and everyone who sees it feels that it came out really well.

There was another scientific benefit that should definitely appeal to anyone who lives in the publish-or-perish world of science research. We published a paper specifically on the project (Azoulay P, Stellman A, Zivin JG. PublicationHarvester. An open-source software tool for science policy research. Research Policy 35 (2006) 970-974. -- there's a link to the PDF on the lead researcher's website.)

It's funny -- I wrote an article a few years ago with Jennifer Greene for O'Reilly ONLamp called What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source. I'm now convinced that science research projects can also learn a great deal from open source as well.

I would go further than just publishing the code used in scientific research. I would build the code by running it a real open source project. In fact, I've done exactly that, and it worked out incredibly well. I believe our open source approach lead to better science, and also better software.

I worked with researchers from MIT and Columbia on a research project that involved gathering and analyzing a large amount of publication data. The results of the study are about to be published (you can read the working paper at the lead researcher's website).

We intended the code for this project to be released from the beginning, so we ran it as an open source project. I followed the basic formula from Karl Fogel's excellent (and free to download) book, Producing Open Source Software: set up a website for the project, created lots of documentation, tried to make it as easy as possible for someone to get up and running, made the source available via Subversion, and made it easy to contact us.

Quality was really important for us, so we put a lot of effort into testing. I definitely believe that the fact that we intended the project to be open source from the beginning helped with that. We weren't treating the code as some piece of throwaway or replaceable lab equipment. I'm convinced that treating it as a real product of the research caused us to take the development and the quality much more seriously than a lot of researchers. I've since heard from other researchers who are starting to use the software as well, and everyone who sees it feels that it came out really well.

There was another scientific benefit that should definitely appeal to anyone who lives in the publish-or-perish world of science research. We published a paper specifically on the project (Azoulay P, Stellman A, Zivin JG. PublicationHarvester. An open-source software tool for science policy research. Research Policy 35 (2006) 970-974. -- there's a link to the PDF on the lead researcher's website.)

It's funny -- I wrote an article a few years ago with Jennifer Greene for O'Reilly ONLamp called What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source. I'm now convinced that science research projects can also learn a great deal from open source as well.

Hmm, it's an interesting theory. You might be right. There seems to be a simple way to verify this though. So here is a suggestion to all readers: You can "write" a paper in 5 seconds, just go to http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/. Then submit it to any of WSEAS conferences, and see whether it will get in.

As lame as this sounds, equality at home from birth produces equality everywhere.

Childless, eh? My mom grew up in a log cabin, got the hell out of the poverty, went to college, and ended up being responsible for the communications network of a major railroad. My wife's a surgeon. My sisters have positions of responsibility in their fields. Frankly, the idea of women as somehow inferior is just foreign to me.

I have two daughters. One plays softball on a year-round team, spends her free time drawing and animating cartoons with Scratch (without me suggesting it - I just showed it to her one day and she took it from there), asked for and got a remote control helicopter for Christmas, and wants to be a biologist or an astronaut.

The other loves strawberries and picks only pink clothes, asks for and gets Littlest Pet Shops and Polly Pockets for birthday and Christmas, wants to be a puppy, and is the stereotype of a little drama queen to her mom's chagrin.

Two kids. Same environment. Same opportunities. One is science oriented, and the other seems tracked for fashion design. I think nature has a lot more influence than you're giving it credit for.

Looking at the author's site, the research group has 3 peer reviewed journal articles, 6 conference papers, some ground tests and experimentation, and flight experiments by the summer -- and quite frankly as someone with a bit of experience in electric propulsion and satellite design (grad student in AERO, did some undergrad EP work), it sounds reasonable.

This doesn't sound like vaporware or pseudo-science -- I'd imagine the article is pretty accurate.

The results are quite different if you compare Theora to a good H.264 encoder like x264.

Some recent comparisons:
Videos Difference especially noticeable on the "The Island" trailer because of the high motion scenes.
Metrics Animated content. Relatively new.
Metrics By one of the Xiph guys. A little older. Huge lead for x264.

It wasn't one fell swoop, a lot of the engineers at Boston Dynamics are from MIT and were doing leg research there.

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/leglab/

I'd love to see some development tools actually on the iPad. It appears that Apple has relaxed some of their rules with the announcement of the iPad so I wouldn't be surprised to see some user-programmable apps. I doubt you'll directly be able to create new apps die to security issues but maybe something like Scratch or maybe even Java or Python based programming. Also, there is nothing stopping anyone from creating a tool to develop web-based apps for the iPhone/iPad from the iPhone/iPad. You could do quite a lot with that given the capabilities of Safari.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/

Worth a look.

This is what MIT's Scratch is all about. It tries to turn programming into visual puzzle pieces so that even kids should be able to get the context without having to worry about semicolons and such. And to the poster below complaining of a "lack of capable teachers", the age of usefulness of capable teachers is coming to an end. What is more appropriate now from the point of view of educational and cognitive research is an age where we have capable coaches guiding us in the process of teaching ourselves. We don't necessarily need to know how to do something to help someone else figure it out; we need to know how to ask good questions and distinguish between good sources of information and Alex Jones.

Obviously "liquid carbon" is the proper name, but I guess why they are calling it "liquid diamond" is because they are exploring the pressure/temperature region of the phase diagram where it solidifies into diamond (ergo diamond floating in liquid carbon).

http://dao.mit.edu/8.231/carbon_phase_diagram.jpg

I don't get whey they are saying liquid Carbon may exist on Uranus though - the phase diagram indicates a minumum temperature for the liquid phase of 4.5 x 10^3 K, and even the core of Uranus is nowhere near that hot. Neptune, maybe.

...such as the Therac-25 malfunction that is the textbook case of how poorly-designed UIs can have catastrophic repercussions. The Nancy Leveson article cited is a fascinating read. It is required reading for my advanced computer science students.

In fact I still use the following...

deb ftp://debian.lcs.mit.edu/debian/ testing non-free

I've been using debian for over 9 years now, and running unstable/testing, I've only installed the OS twice. Once at birth and once on the switch to raid. Not once have I had a problem doing pretty much whatever I want it to do.

"Ah yes, scienceblogs. What a hotbed of unbiased information that is."

Of course, it's biased. It's written by real scientists, publishing peer-reviewed papers.

"McIntyre is the man responsible for the questioning of and the debunking of the Mann hockey-stick graph which the IPCC had to ditch after it was pointed out how ridiculous it was."

Yep. That's exactly what I mean, deniers can't admit that they were wrong and just repeat the same lies over and over again.

The "hockey stick" has been proved to be essentially correct:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/4411032a.html (but of course, "Nature" is also a part of the conspiracy)

http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_Comment.pdf

Must be a typo. I think you'll find most seem to be pretty favourable to H.264. Unless that is you could provide a single link that shows a Theora video with higher quality than H.264 at the same bitrate?

I could give you about 10 that show otherwise. here's one

Once you compare Theora to a high quality H.264 encoder it looks pretty bad, unfortunately most people here only seem to know that one comparison done by Xiph themselves against the (relatively crappy) Youtube H.264 encoder with animated content where differences are generally harder to spot. The differences at the same bitrate are obvious in other comparisons.

Here are some more:
Videos Encoded with Theora 1.1 and x264 r1259. The "Island" trailer shows the differences well because there are lots of high motion scenes.
Metrics Animated content. Relatively new.
Metrics By one of the Xiph guys. A little older. Huge lead for H.264.

What does anyone else think of this MIT article from june of 2002 http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/representation/CF_JEP_Final.pdf titled ' Why is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?' which basically says that political campaigns do not get most of their money from corporations or corporation like entities, and furthermore, legislators largely do not vote based on donations from such entities. It kinda makes my head spin as I still, maybe ignorantly, believe otherwise. -Noble

I am currently working on automated GUI tests for an application, and Sikuli looks pretty great -- even when compared to enterprise level automated GUI testing tools costing in the order of thousands of dollars per user licence.

Some of the commenting below on maintainability problems seem pretty superficial. For example, to ease maintainability you could build a framework abstracting GUI component images from regression test scripts. For example, you could assign a screenshot as a variable and then refer to that variable throughout your test, so if a button happens to change dramatically, you make the change in potentially one place in your code instead of every time it is used in a click. The fact that the tool appears simple (not too many bells and whistles) and is based on Python seems to be major advantages for maintainability.

Check out this interesting academic paper which specifically addresses using Sikuli for automated GUI testing: "GUI Testing Using Computer Vision, CHI 2010" at http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/documentation.shtml

Has anybody actually used Sikuli? I'd be very curious if anybody has used this for automated GUI testing in a corporate environment...

Apparently it's to "make Firefox feel faster". What a terrible decision, I had to immediately figure out how to change things back.

You got to be kidding. Well, there's a reason why you found it better to post as AC, isn't it?

Ad hominem. Perfect start. I post AC because I don't have an account.

After all, if we play the clips available in that site side by side (which are equivalent in any way) then the only difference you may get will be nothing more than subjective opinions which, I believe, would be go up in smoke if a double blind test as conducted. In fact, if you play the 499kbit/sec comparison side by side you will find the image in the Theora/Vorbis clip to be less grainy and sharper than the h.264 counterpart.

If you view them side by side you'll see the blocky pattern in the Theora encoded clips and you'll see the image degrading into a blocky mess once there is a lot of motion, especially in the "Island" Trailer. I didn't specifically point it out as I figured it would be obvious to anyone watching the clips.

The rest of your comments are just laughable. If we are comparing youtube videos to Theora then it is more than legitimate to compare Theora's codec with youtube's h.264 codec. And your absurd complain about animation clips being used in the comparisson, let's not even delve into the obvious details that it is far easier to legally get your hands on HD videos. The link you provided explicitly states that:

I utilized the Blender Foundation's Big Buck Bunny as my test case because of its clear licensing status, because it's a real world test case, and because I have it available in a lossless format. I am not aware of any reason why this particular clip would favor either Theora or H.264.

While this topic isn't about Youtube you stated in your post that Theora and H.264 provide the same quality. You weren't talking about specific implementations. You didn't mention Youtube and the comparison you linked didn't use youtube for H.264 encoding either. The link I provided doesn't state that at all, it is just a comparison of a film trailer and a shuttle launch done by a slashdot member. Furthermore I didn't say that animated content would favor anyone. I said that animation is easy to compress and therefore makes differences harder to spot. Still they come out quite big SSIM. Hint for the graph, the column saying "x264 baseline" could be used by Youtube without without making use of any features they don't use already.

Video encoding is my hobby. I have tested Theora myself when 1.1 came out and they've had some nice improvements, but nothing that brings them anywhere near a good H.264 encoder like x264, especially not at the low bitrates we are talking about. I don't see a reason why I should put up another comparison when there are plenty available. Even one by the Xiph people themselves shows x264 as an H.264 encoder provides a solid lead over Theora, even with defaults. The defaults used to be very fast settings and were changed some time after this comparison IIRC.

A bit off topic:
Posting AC doesn't automatically make me wrong. Not posting my own comparison doesn't automatically make me wrong either.

The left lane is for passing - you do not drive in that lane for any period of time or at any speed, unless passing. Why don't more people know/respect this law?

Probably because it's not a law, at least not in my state(MD).

Check before you rant

MIT has a product in the works called the Copenhagen Wheel that's a straight replacement for your rear tire. The motor, batteries and regenerative brakes are all contained in the oversized hub and the controls are connected via bluetooth to eliminate wiring. They are planning to enter production sometime this year, but no hard details yet.

The crux is to use "Magnetically coupled resonance" to achieve efficient power transfer to prevent the vast majority of power from being broadcast into space (read wasted) when no receiver is present to absorb it. Unfortunately that very feature seems to severely limit the transmission range.

So I wouldn't worry about long-distance power transmission through the air just yet.

I'm more worried about plans for space-based power transmission which were recently green-lighted in California. For example, what happens when the beam from such satellites shifts from the intended receiver area to, say, a residential block?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#cite_note-intensity-41 at the center of the downward beam, we would be looking at 23 mW/cm2 (and 1 mW/cm2 outside the center), compared to OSHA workplace exposure limits for microwaves, which are 10 mW/cm2. Not bad, but not good either. Suppose someone goofs and directs the beam onto a kindergarten and leaves it there for a week. What then?

Those 23 mW might not look like much, but it's still 230 W/m2, and it's radio-frequency which penetrates far deeper than visible light. I simply don't know how detrimental that is, but I'd like to be sure of the potential long-term effects before anything like that is built, let alone switched on. I'm certainly no Luddite, but in the light of e.g. findings like these (see http://www.isracast.com/article.aspx?id=57) about the detrimental effects of 2mW of 1.1GHz radiation on eye lenses I feel we ought to be careful. Signal-level transmission at 2mW is one thing, but power level transmission at 23mW/cm2 is something else.

I thought they quantified uncertainty in a very nuanced, open manner.

The scale of the damages is, as you say, still up for debate. It may well be comparable to a global dustbowl, which by itself would be worse than the 1930s version that was specific to north America. But it could also be worse if we've underestimated the positive feedback effects at the timescale from now until 2100 in the same way we're underestimating the longer-period positive feedback effects of the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.

And you're right, the human race is good at adapting. I think the evidence available is sufficient that we need to start adapting by spurring a new industrial revolution (probably nuclear-based) to help wean ourselves from a (limited) fuel that props up oppressive foreign regimes.

Excellent response. May I only add that there is a good overview of the types of math used by many programmers in the MIT Open Course "Mathematics for Computer Science"
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-042JSpring-2005/LectureNotes/index.htm

If only the US had launched some space observatories
If only the US had bothered to maintain some of its science assets
If only the US had conducted any exploration of our solar system
If only the US had commissioned any meaningful physics experiments
If only the US had any anthropologists discovering stuff
If only the US had any geneticists discovering stuff
If only the US had bothered to conduct any nuclear physics experiments
If only the US had any medical science to speak of
If only the US had any practicing bioengineers
If only the US had funded any studies into the harmful effects of BPA

...then maybe then SlashSnot editors would avoid indulging their myopic views of the US science.

We've already got program that automatically generates research paper for you, called SCIgen

Who knew that tinfoil hats actually _boosted_ reception.

everyone but you

You might want to check Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/ It's free, runs on Linux, Mac and Win and let's people share their videogames and animations on the web. It was discussed before here: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/1420238 For those interested in connecting to the physical world you can get the PicoBoard or the LEGO WeDo which interface with Scratch

It's visual, promotes imagination, and has a fantastic online community where your kid can share his project, get feedback, ask for advice, etc. http://scratch.mit.edu/ great article from ACM to whet your appetite: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/11/48421-scratch-programming-for-all/fulltext good luck!

I've found Scratch to be very accessible for kids starting around 7. http://scratch.mit.edu/

The visual programming language was used by Lego for the Mindstorm platform, as well as others. I believe there is an Arduino front end too.

Scratch TNG is a 3d version of Scratch tilted to simulation.

Alice, Storytelling alice, and Alice 3 are all nice. Alice3 has an onion-skinning mode where the visual programming language can be peeled down to the underlaying Java code in a series of discrete abstraction steps.

Unity3d, recently made free, would be another step along. A non programmer can get somethings to happen pretty easily. Underneath you are scripting in a javascript variant, python, or C.

I would agree with Scratch as well. We ended up going with Alice for our 13-year-old, as the 3D interactions seemed more her style, but the social networking aspect of Scratch is a really powerful point in its favor.

For those too lazy to click the link, Scratch is a Smalltalk-style language wrapped in a graphical shell which makes it impossible to create syntax errors (you drag/drop code snippets and pick arguments from drop-down lists) and very easy to create simple 2D graphics and interactive apps. It also allows the programmer to post his creation on the Web for other Scratch users to download and improve on, and of course allows him to take someone else's fully-formed app and tweak it to his liking.

The only downside I see is that there isn't much of a "natural" next step once you hit the ceiling of its capabilities. But then, by that time there's a good chance your brother will have decided he likes this programming thing enough to invest some time and abstract thought in Python or whatever, or that it's not really worth all the fuss.

I never got into Logo myself (no computers at all until college, and then it was shell scripts to self-taught C to whatever else). However, I think that today the "turtle graphics" system is a bit too primitive to capture the interest of a middle-school-age kid. I mean, making a turtle draw a line on the screen is no longer something magical.

IMHO, something like Alice or Scratch would be a much more promising introduction to programming concepts, with more "interesting" results (making 3D characters interact with each other and the user on-screen is a bit more likely to draw the attention of an average mid-schooler than recreating Spirographs on the screen).

What do you think?

• Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/
• Alice: http://alice.org/
• Storytelling Alice: http://alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html

Yes, these are the ones I dropped in to recommend. Most 12-year-olds aren't going to be delighted by "Hello World" or Fibonacci sequence programs. Scratch and Alice are actually fun ways to start, giving instant, interesting feedback while teaching fundamentals of programming. Incidentally, Alice was written in Python, and one of the people in charge of it was Randy Pausch of "The Last Lecture" fame.