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Your source thinks evolution is science and gives interviews to Rush Limbaugh. He also participated in a movie that:

• Misrepresents the views of interviewed scientists.
• Claims that anthropogenic global warming is a giant conspiracy to oppress Africa.
• Relies heavily on the well-debunked theory that solar activity can account for present-day warming and blatantly misrepresents data to support that view.
• Mislabels the axis of a graph, presenting data up to the early 80s as data up to 2000, because showing the actual data going that far would contradict its claims.
• Says that volcanoes produce more CO2 than man.
• Parrots the oft-repeated claim that scientists are just in it for the money. All of them, every single one. It's a giant conspiracy and nobody involved has come out and said anything.
• Is made by an immature, childish asshole.

And is in general laden with half-truths and outright lies.

Forgive me if I'm a tad bit skeptical.

There is a great little circuit for something called a "Drawdio" http://web.media.mit.edu/~silver/drawdio/ that kids really love, basically it's an astable 555 that makes a noises with pitch proportional to how long they draw pencil marks. (it's a bit hard to explain quickly, just try the video on that website)
I teach middle school aged kids electronics at a local workshop, building things such as that, and I can tell you it's very doable to make projects for cheap that kids can build and understand.
The main issues that I have found is the board on which you lay out projects. Breadboards are expensive, and not permanent. PCBs don't allow kids to experiment with their own circuit designs, and unless you are going to take the time and money to let them design their own boards that might not work and then etch them, it's more trouble than it is worth. We use a more traditional breadboard concept that is just an actual, wooden board. Then we have kids use copper tacks and strips to lay down the circuitry, and then they solder things directly to that.
As other people have mentioned, soldering irons are a bit annoying, and a couple kids might get some mild burns, but as long as you don't mind the initial cost, it's totally doable.
One of the great things about the drawdio project, is it allows you to hook it up to a oscilloscope and show the kids more about sound, or hook the piezo speaker up to a computer and run some FFT software, so they can see and hear how the resistance changes the pitch.

Other things to look into are basic transistor circuits, things with opamps, counters, or things with binary to decimal or binary to seven segment LCD chips.

My kids love Scratch from MIT

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Don't worry too much about learning a particular language. If you understand the core principles of good programming practice, you will be able to readily take advantage of the feature set of almost any good language.

In this regard, I think the best book to learn and reinforce the fundamentals of computer science would be Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

It uses the language called Scheme, which is a *very* slight variation of common lisp that is much simpler. Lisp is already a very simple language due to its regular syntax (sometimes thought of as "lack of syntax"), and yet it is wickedly powerful and succinct.

All this being said, if you *really* want to get the most mileage out of learning a particular language, learn C. It is the inspiration for the syntactic nuances of most new languages that have been created over the last 30 years. It has been the common-denominator-language that all software developers share.

FAIL for not using some variant of LISP to define the != symbol.

So it's Scheme you want. Did you mean =, equal?, eqv?, or eq??

Hm, that link is messed up. Let's try again:

http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/steve-chu-in-rs.pdf

In fact it's not even really legal to "drive" in the passing lane. The right lane is for driving, and the left lane is for passing. If, you're in the left lane you're supposed to be passing. You could actually get a ticket for driving in the left lane, regardless of speed, but most people probably aren't even aware of that.

It appears there is much you are not aware of either: http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

There are exactly 8 US states where it is outright illegal to be in the left lane when not passing.

It's like people who go 45 MPH in the left lane on a 55 MPH road. Yeah, that's definitely what the laws say you can do, but most people don't, and the presence of a vehicle going a different speed from the flow of traffic creates danger and stress that shouldn't be there.

That is (generally) incorrect. Slower traffic is generally required to be in the right lane per law - source: http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

What am I, as a Schemer? A minimalist? A chess player? But seriously, I always saw PHP as one of the prime examples of cargo cult language design. "Perl has strings in front of variables, let's copy them, gods will be pleased." Obviously no one cared that in Perl, the sigil has some actual meaning, like in shell, unlike in PHP, where the single type of variables could be handled the same way it is handled in Python, Ruby, stc. And then the adoption of that strange Java-like OOP system, quite weird for a dynamically typed language. Another cargo cult thinking? "Let's make a cargo plane out of wood and straw, soon the big birds will drop us more crates."

Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.

Define Climatologists, last time I checked they were a motley crew consisting of Meteorologists, Oceanographers, Geologists and a smattering of other various disciplines. Climatology doesn't have enough history behind it to be considered anything more than an area of interest by real scientists. Even at that, a man with a B.S., Physics, from California Institute of Technology, and Ph.D., in Economics, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology should be assumed to have as much scientific horsepower as most Climatologists; the closest thing MIT offers to Climatology is described as interdisciplinary. Alchemists did a lot of work that was valid and useful but they weren't Chemists and there was a time when Astronomers paid the bills by doing astrology, but when adherence to established dogma is more important than reasoned decent you have a religion not a science.

Pack thermionic converters between the components. They'll help cool and recover some power from heat back to power. They can be on the board, or placed on a cover over it in such a way as to fit between the board components. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/electricity-1205.html

Build in parallel processing with 16 processors, 4 on each side of a 4D-cube, as in the Connection Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

Three boards, stacked. Top, thermionics on the underside fitting between the main components, top side of the board is keyboard. Main in the middle, components top side. Bottom board, cram full of memory, below main board to keep it away from the heat. Vents underneath and through memory and main boards, so convection can feed heat to the top board.

fuck-the-skull-of-jesus (the best satire site on the internet; updated once every 4 years or so) had the final word on this in 2002.

http://fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu/osamajesus.html

That's not what I read here: http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html

Says in theory Theora could perform somewhere between mpeg4 and h264, but (as always) that requires time and effort.

If you are referring to H.264; in most tests, it is beaten by Theora in bitrate/quality.

What "most tests" are you referring to? The author of the story that you're most likely thinking of had to publish a correction to clarify that the original results were caused by ffmpeg defects that favored one codec over the other.

I learned more from these than some semesters of classes. street fighting math mathematics for computer science and information and entropy.

I learned more from these than some semesters of classes. street fighting math mathematics for computer science and information and entropy.

I learned more from these than some semesters of classes. street fighting math mathematics for computer science and information and entropy.

I agree; what an idiot. There's more useful, educational information instantly available on the internet than any library in the world will ever hold.

A simple question: I've seen basically everybody access Wikipedia, and a large fraction of the internet users I know have used Youtube... but I've never seen anyone use MITs Open Course Ware. Do you people have any success stories with that?

I only tried once, and the material was not useful for what I wanted to learn (programming, it seems MITs courses are/were far different from the rest of the world. I will try to learn different paradigms someday...)

BTW, I just visited it again, and I'm glad to see some courses are starting to be translated, and the site is far better than what it was when I first visited.

"Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line."

See MIT opencourseware:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

And googlebooks if google could take it further and unlock it's potential would be a godsend. I've found countless books I would hav enever have found traditionally at a library via googlebook search.

I agree; what an idiot. There's more useful, educational information instantly available on the internet than any library in the world will ever hold. Just because he's too old and blind to find anything other than Yahoo games doesn't mean that the internet is distracting and meaningless. I'm sure Wikipedia alone has orders of magnitude more educational reading material than you could read going to the library three times a week for generations.

New PHP Interpreter Findx XSS, Injection Holes

New PHP Interpreter Finds XSS, Injection Holes

Fixed it for you.

Clearly the title was trying to illustrate the PHP interpreter's ability to solve the pythagorean theorem.

Xiph's own metrics show a 2x advantage on even a very easy short clip:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

That's about 1.5x, not 2x.

"Better" is alwasy about context. Try a head-to-head for a scenario of interest to you.

"Better" to me is quite clear: the one that is unencumbered and good enough technically is better. See here for a trustworthy comparison of H.264 vs Theora PSNR, showing Theora running about 2 db behind H.264 currently. Not only is that not enough to bother me, but the other thing you see from the graph is the gap steadily closing. Theora is already good enough for me, versus H.264's huge disadvantage of being heavily legally encumbered, and thus unsuited to use in a web standard.

I will take "good enough" any day over lawyer bait. Sorry, you may be a codec geek but as a Softie you are a geek with an agenda. Cred -1.

This?

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

I read it, and have commented on it at length throughout this thread.

Basically the article briefly says that YouTube's H.264 is better than Theora, and then goes on at length showin how Theroa is better than H.263.

Xiph's own data shows H.264 has a big bitrate advantage at the same quality level even in a test that should favor Theora.

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

in the Rate-Distorion graph, note they start the plot at 50 Kbps, so look at the actual numbers.

For example, at 40 dB, x264 needs 70 Kbps and Theora needs 120 Kbps.

The gap would be bigger with higher motion, more detail, longer content, and particular when there are buffer constraints. Also, x264 is (properly) tuned for perceptual quality more than strict PSNR accuracy.

Theora suffers from not being a very mature implementation (which Xiph is making great progress on addressing) and being a 90's era codec design (about which Xiph can't do anything without breaking compatibility). And other codecs are getting better as well; if Theroa is refined enough to be reasonably optimal in a year, it'll be competing against the improved H.264 and VC-1 codecs of a year from now, and H.265 not that far away.

There are all kinds of interesting things about Theora, but competitive low bitrate compression efficiency isn't going to be one of them.

Where's your evidence? Why is Greg's example odd? Have you done a comparable experiment with a different video clip to justify your 2x claim, or more importantly, show that at the same bitrate Theora looks much worse on your clip?

Xiph's own metrics show a 2x advantage on even a very easy short clip:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

And yes, I've done plenty of my own tests as well on Big Buck Bunny and many other clips.

Why would it, since it didn't at 499Kbps? Or are you claiming that Youtube uses a bad H.264 encoder? Or do you think that example is rigged?

YouTube doesn't use High Profile (no 8x8 blocks or adaptive quantization matricies) or CABAC entropy coding. So they're going to be at least 20% less efficient than the best encodes could be.

Also, they trimmed the clip before the really interesting high motion parts. Most of the shots in the section they did use were static camera, and as animation is noise-free. Toss a nice grainy movie trailer in there and Theora shows basis pattern left and right.

I wish he'd reported the Theora settings used in the encode.

Understanding TFA linked from your "equally good" link to a slashdot story? YOU FAIL IT!!! From TFA:

Let me reiterate- and this is important- as folks have run way too far cherrypicking quotes from this update: Both before and after the correction, this graph shows only that Theora is improving. PSNR means very little when comparing Theora directly to x264. PSNR is an objective measure that does not represent perceived quality (though they correlate), and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. None of these PSNR measurements, including clips where Thusnelda 'wins', mean that Thusnelda beats x264 in perceived quality, as it certainly does not (yet ;-), only that the gap is closing even before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.

So just to recap, you have suggested that Ogg Theora video provides quality comparable to H.264 based on a study using a specific development-version Ogg Theora video codec and a specific H.264 encoder (x264) which is NOT the best encoder around, when it in fact has inferior SnR (the only thing the study was meant to test) as compared to x264, which has inferior SnR as compared to other H.264 encoders?
I don't know who failed bigger, you, Soulskill, or the peoples of slashdot who actually use the firehose... but you have all failed miserably.

With all that said; is there any reason they can't add Theora support later?

"3. nuclear power: more than 3 cents/kwh, more than 3 cents/kwh "

and where did he get this number from? The major MIT study has nuclear power at 8.4 cents/kwh. I know which value I trust more.

Trying to deliberately weaken the readership for purposes I can only speculate that.

(tinfoil hat on)
It takes just a little logic to show that this is the natural result of any advertisement supported media.

First: consider who the customer is. Traditionally, the customer is the person or entity who pays for goods and services. In the case of advertising supported media, it is the advertisers who pay, so they are the customer.

Second: consider what the product being sold is. The product being sold is that which the customers pay for. The advertisers are not paying for the media content, they are paying for the viewers' or readers' attention. Therefore, the audience of advertising supported media is actually the product, the media being offered is more akin to the capital used to create the product, such as machinery in a factory.

Third: Consider what the goals of the media providers should be. The goal of any company is to increase revenue. In a free market this is traditionally done by offering a product that balances high quality with low price. Since the product is the attention of the audience, the goal will be to produce an audience that best fits the advertiser's needs.

Fourth: Consider what the advertiser's needs entail. The advertiser wishes to purchase the attention of an audience that will be most likely to purchase goods and services based on the advertising. Therefore, the best audience from the advertiser's perspective is a gullible audience.

Fifth: Consider how media companies could go about creating the ideal product. Since the best product is a gullible audience, then the media companies would be best served by creating capital that attracts and retains a gullible audience, with the "ideal" scenario being that the media itself maintains the gullibility of the audience. The advertiser pays media industry has a very unique position: Creating media that attracts and caters to gullible audiences is actually far cheaper to do than creating media that stimulates the viewers intellect.

Conclusion: Since the primary motive of most corporations, especially publicly traded ones, in a capitalist free market is and theoretically should be to increase profits, it follows logically that creating sensationalist poorly written tripe is actually the responsible course of action for advertiser supported media organizations to take.

(tinfoil hat off.) Uhoh... It appears that my wearing of the tinfoil hat may be just what THEY want me to do... does that mean that my theory is what THEY want us to believe???

Speed limits are not law, the signs are mere recommendations of speed. What is being enforced is the traffic officer's opinion that you are going over the safe speed for that area. It's a tricky thing, because even obeying all the signs on the road can still net you a speeding ticket.

Not true. While speeds below the speed limit may still be considered unsafe and attract a summons, any speed over the posted limit is prima facie evidence of unreasonable speed and is illegal on that basis alone.

AC QUOTES THE LAW

I see nothing in your post that contradicts mine. Texas sets certain speeds that are illegal to exceed. Speed in excess of these numbers is illegal simply because of the speed itself. The same principle applies in nearly every state.

You appear to be stating absolutes, which is not correct. Maybe it is just how you write, but your statements should not be absolute.
the signs are mere recommendations of speed is what you should have been responding to, and appeared to be with any speed over the posted limit is prima facie evidence of unreasonable speed and is illegal on that basis alone. My base was that you were stating the posted speed sign limit was the law, which I am still concluding from your post.
Texas, as pointed out in the quote from the TEXAS TRANSPORTATION CODE provides exceptions and is in fact up to 85, not 80 as John Carr has listed - maybe someone just needs to update their page as that is a few years old.
Also going off of John Carr's information, In Rhode Island, Texas, and Utah driving faster than the speed limit is prima facie evidence of unreasonable speed. One can argue in court that one was exceeding the speed limit but should not be convicted because the speed was safe (when they accept this argument, judges will likely want to see evidence beyond a defendant's claim that he was driving safely). These states are marked "[P]". - What this states is that prima facie is simply what it means, not that it is therefor illegal.
None of this really matters though. If you get caught speeding then take it to a Jury who should rule on the side of the Law in how it is written; not how a Judge may feel after asking the police officer if he thought the driving appeared to be "safe" and trying to make you prove it... Remember, you do not have to prove your innocence but they do have to prove your guilt, and one persons opinion of anothers' safe driving is not the law(especially when there are hidden quotas[performance goals] to be met). Enough AC rambling in this off-topic discussion though.

Speed limits are not law, the signs are mere recommendations of speed. What is being enforced is the traffic officer's opinion that you are going over the safe speed for that area. It's a tricky thing, because even obeying all the signs on the road can still net you a speeding ticket.

Not true. While speeds below the speed limit may still be considered unsafe and attract a summons, any speed over the posted limit is prima facie evidence of unreasonable speed and is illegal on that basis alone.

AC QUOTES THE LAW

I see nothing in your post that contradicts mine. Texas sets certain speeds that are illegal to exceed. Speed in excess of these numbers is illegal simply because of the speed itself. The same principle applies in nearly every state.

You appear to be stating absolutes, which is not correct. Maybe it is just how you write, but your statements should not be absolute.
the signs are mere recommendations of speed is what you should have been responding to, and appeared to be with any speed over the posted limit is prima facie evidence of unreasonable speed and is illegal on that basis alone. My base was that you were stating the posted speed sign limit was the law, which I am still concluding from your post.
Texas, as pointed out in the quote from the TEXAS TRANSPORTATION CODE provides exceptions and is in fact up to 85, not 80 as John Carr has listed - maybe someone just needs to update their page as that is a few years old.
Also going off of John Carr's information, In Rhode Island, Texas, and Utah driving faster than the speed limit is prima facie evidence of unreasonable speed. One can argue in court that one was exceeding the speed limit but should not be convicted because the speed was safe (when they accept this argument, judges will likely want to see evidence beyond a defendant's claim that he was driving safely). These states are marked "[P]". - What this states is that prima facie is simply what it means, not that it is therefor illegal.
None of this really matters though. If you get caught speeding then take it to a Jury who should rule on the side of the Law in how it is written; not how a Judge may feel after asking the police officer if he thought the driving appeared to be "safe" and trying to make you prove it... Remember, you do not have to prove your innocence but they do have to prove your guilt, and one persons opinion of anothers' safe driving is not the law(especially when there are hidden quotas[performance goals] to be met). Enough AC rambling in this off-topic discussion though.

I see nothing in your post that contradicts mine. Texas sets certain speeds that are illegal to exceed. Speed in excess of these numbers is illegal simply because of the speed itself. The same principle applies in nearly every state.

We have to be more careful with what we mean by 'size' and 'volume' and such.

The observable universe is the region of space we can see. The universe has a finite age, so there is a finite distance over which we can see. Any further than that, and light literally hasn't had enough time to reach us. So there is indeed a boundary beyond which we cannot observe. This boundary recedes as time goes on. The universe is ~13.5 billion years old, but because the universe was expanding during all that time, the observable universe is bigger than just 13.5 billion light-years (see comoving distance)... in fact it is 46.5 billion light-years in radius.

Now there is every indication that the universe extends beyond the cosmological horizon. So as the universe ages, we see more and more of the full universe, which is much larger than our observation volume. So how big is the universe as a whole? Our best understanding right now is based on the curvature of spacetime. If spacetime at large scales is curved, then the universe can loop back upon itself and thus the universe is finite. If spacetime is perfectly flat on cosmological scales, then in fact the universe as a whole is infinite in size.

Our best measurements indicate the universe is flat, within error. Our best theories of the origin of the universe, coupled with available data, generically predict that the universe is infinite. So our current best answer is that the universe is infinite in size/volume. A strange result, perhaps, but that's our best understanding of the current data. Now there are indeed errors on our measurements, so our universe could be smaller. But the curvature is so small that it implies our universe contains at least 1000 Hubble volumes (the Hubble volume is the surrounding space beyond which nothing is accessible since matter is receding faster than light). Others have analyzed the night-sky looking for 'repeat patterns' that would be expected for smaller closed universes, and no such patterns have been found.

So the observable universe is finite (but ever-expanding), and the full universe is considerably larger (infinite according to our current best data and theories).

I've encountered bits and pieces of Unix hagiography for the last 15 years, and in all that time, I've internalized that "Multics sucks" (somewhere alongside the virgin birth), yet I can't bring to mind a single reason *why* Multics sucked. Were the Romans really so stupid as they are made out to be?

From Fernando J. Corbató's 1991 Turing lecture concerning one of Muttlix's early teething problems:

The decision to use a compiler to implement the system software was a good one, but what we did not appreciate was that new language PL/I presented us with two big difficulties: First, the language had constructs in it which were intrinsically complicated, and it required a learning period on the part of system programmers to learn to avoid them; second, no one knew how to do a good job of implementing the compiler.

So, perhaps, not the best suited language for systems programming?
From Wikipedia:

The goal of PL/I was to develop a single language usable for both business and scientific purposes.

Doesn't that vision give your average PHB a throbbing chum? If simplicity is hard, let's scale up the mediocre talent and do sameness instead.

PL/I was designed by a committee drawn from IBM programmers and users drawn from across the United States, working over several months.

No sociology experiment from the 1960s was complete without confederates in white shirts. The free-love hippies managed to sneak into the language promiscuous data type conversions.

Dijkstra summed it up in 1975 with his monograph
How do we tell truths that might hurt?

PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

God, I love this guy. He's the patron saint of annoying the hell out of people by always being right, and putting a fine point on it. Same monograph includes another famous zinger:

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past.

From Myths about Multics

We wrote 3000 pages of the Multics System Programmer's Manual first, while waiting for the PL/I compiler.

That should strike a painful nerve in anyone who tried to adopt the C++ STL in 1994.

Ouch. Shipwrecked on the beach of half a programming language, fondling your monads.

Not half surprising that Thompson ended up carving his own canoe with a pen knife to escape.

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that is a coincidence."

Neither of them were, of course, invented at Berkeley; one might, at best, argue that Berkeley perfected both of them. :-)

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix.
I don't think that is a coincidence."

Gee, I hope they don't try and implement any kind of directory service implementation from Scratch

There's almost nothing free you can put on a personal page that will be professional, cool, interesting and practical all at the same time.

If you're already using web 2.0 stuff (which it seems like you are), people would rather see your google calendar, facebook or linkedin page... something with content.

You don't need a dedicated domain for that, so stick with nothing and save the effort for another facebook quiz. :)

If you are really bored and want something as a place-holder, make a puzzle.

I'm a fan of Fluidics, which can create analog or digital devices based on fluid flow.

See this powerpoint for a great history of fluidics.

Even AdBlock and NoScript may not be enough. I've read about a recent trend where adverts are hosted directly on the content server. So if your website "requires" JavaScript and/or people have whitelisted it, ads will get through because the scripts and images are hosted directly on your website. Bastards.

In case you are willing to do something about it:

• Greasemonkey (FF|IE)
• Platypus
• Shiftspace
• JetPack
• Chickenfoot
• Privoxy
• Proximodo

the last of which is hosted by... SourceForge.

I've got an ITS system that I occasionally fire up in an emulator if I'm feeling really retro. I don't actually use it for anything, though.

There are a number of people at my workplace who still use their old Symbolics LISP Machines on a daily basis. They swear that there has never been a better development environment, and that it's really a tragedy that lispms failed in the marketplace.

noah

Umm, when people first started recognizing the problem the issue *was* just a degree or two.
On a global scale, one degree mean temperature increase is a shit load of energy being dumped
into the weather system. Now we're looking at several degrees due to inaction:
http://globalchange.mit.edu/resources/gamble/

and, the original source: Powerpoint presentation from LBL: "Global Cooling: Increasing World-wideUrban Albedos to Offset CO2," Hashem Akbari PDF file

and, the original source: Powerpoint presentation from LBL: "Global Cooling: Increasing World-wideUrban Albedos to Offset CO2," Hashem Akbari PDF file

I assume they'll use the new rapid charging battery tech. Pump the solar panels into some very big capacitors, then unload them into the batteries.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/battery-material-0311.html

If you, as I, accept Lynn Margulis's hypothesis, parasitic and symbiotic interactions with microbes play a much stronger role in driving evolutionary diversification than "random" mutations of the genome.

The only reasonable ref I could find quickly is from 1991: Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis.

1) Aesthetic according to what standard?

2) Art is more than photos. Much art moved away from realism 150 years ago.

Some short thoughts on the topic by a physicist.

Actually...

According to this guy, IE using visitors account for only about 14% of the crowd here on Slashdot, and the number is shrinking.

And, personally, I agree with all of the meanings of "hacker" shown at Wikipedia here on the disambiguation page, though I'd personally prefer to extend it to also include the classic MIT usage, since that seems to be where the word originated to begin with.

BSD sockets have a limitation of only a single stream at a time (for example, if you are loading a website over HTTP and you get stuck loading a huge image, you have no choice but to open up another socket connection or else wait). They are also stuck around the paradigm of only supporting byte streams, which means that users are always forced to write the same code over and over to create packet headers or delimited messages.

I would highly recommend checking out Structured Stream Transport. I'm not from MIT and I wasn't entirely satisfied with their sample implementation, but the paper is really insightful and explains how you can develop basically a smarter version of TCP that is both more efficient and also more flexible. And I'm sure there are other systems being developed with similar ideas in mind.

We definitely need to keep bsd sockets, if not just because I'm a regular user of netcat :-p, and also because they are what allow the creation of more advanced protocols, but I don't think most applications should still be using such low-level protocols today.

See http://web.mit.edu/nse/ and scroll down.

You're looking for the section that starts "Senior Design Class (22.033) uses fusion energy for hydrogen fuel production". It includes links to PDFs of the final presentation and the final report.

Subtext being that this WowPod is basically a diorama of slightly higher quality than that of a 5th grader but is deemed newsworthy by being contexted with World of Warcraft and having been done by MIT students.

... and having an integrated data reader, intelligent cooking system, servo-controlled cooking apparatus, software tie-ins, and even simulated avatar interaction. (See the original blog for details, rather than the blog-about-a-blog in the summary)

True, it's no PhD thesis, but it is inventive and amusing, and a nice brief distraction during the workday. Whether it belongs in Idle or not is up to the editors, but I was entertained.