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Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his material. "You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone should have a node on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to say is, 'IP doesn't scale!'" ("IP" is the interface protocol for the Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software is simply not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor says, "is: evolve the protocol! Get the smart people together and figure out what to do. Do we add ID? Do we add new protocol? Don't just say, we can't do it."

http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part4.html

People have known since at least 1991 that IPv4 is shit.

"To do even this simple thing with Linux, all of our applications would have to be re-written to enable a new file specification syntax, hopefully one reasonably compatible with the past. We're talking about a shitload of work, so it's important to agree on a set of goals first, to avoid having to re-do it later."

So basically the timeline comes to the file system. Good thing there are standards.

Not "dumbed down" in the least: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video_index.php

For tech, their Innovation/Invention category... However whether you judge it entertaining depends on how much you enjoy detailed lectures and an appeal to intellectual audiences.

Want to reflect a lot of light back? Require all new homes to go up with white roof coverings...

wasn't that a slashdot article a month or so back?
MIT article tracker
LA times article
Christian Science Monitor Blog
Powerpoint presentation from LBL: "Global Cooling: Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2," Hashem Akbari (as pdf):

Want to reflect a lot of light back? Require all new homes to go up with white roof coverings...

wasn't that a slashdot article a month or so back?
MIT article tracker
LA times article
Christian Science Monitor Blog
Powerpoint presentation from LBL: "Global Cooling: Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2," Hashem Akbari (as pdf):

Citizen Engineer only has one episode out so far, and looks like it's going to be mostly hardhacking, but it's definitely not dumbed-down.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a serious discussion on the future of tech with a stronger grip on reality than Popular Science, try MIT's LabCast videos, with footage of working prototypes.

Before I respond concerning very specific policies of the (now defunct) Soviet Union, I would like to have some more substantial corroboration than what you understand to be the case.

My impression is somewhat in error. There were four USSR submarines with nuclear tipped torpedoes in play, but they weren't authorized to use them. It didn't keep one submarine commander from threatening to do so:

The four diesel submarines, which were armed with both conventional and nuclear-tipped torpedoes, sailed from the Arctic Kola Peninsula. They managed to pass unnoticed through U.S. and NATO cordons in the northern Atlantic, but were spotted by the Navy as they approached Cuba. The submarines needed to come to the surface often to charge their batteries, and that made them easy marks for the U.S. anti-submarine cordons around the communist island.

Capt. Valentin Savitsky's B-59 submarine was quickly spotted by Navy patrol aircraft when it appeared on the surface. American destroyers rushed to block the submarine and began dropping stun grenades to force it to resurface, said Vadim Orlov, who was in charge of the submarine's radio intelligence at the time.

``The Americans encircled us and began dropping grenades that were exploding right next to us,'' Orlov was quoted as saying in the book. ``It felt like sitting in a metal barrel with someone hitting it with a sledgehammer. The crew was in shock.''

The bombardment went on for several hours and some sailors lost consciousness as oxygen ran low and temperatures inside the submarine soared above 122 degrees.

After an especially strong explosion shook the submarine, ``Savitsky got furious and ordered an officer in charge of a nuclear-tipped torpedo to arm the weapon,'' Orlov said in the book.

``There may be a war raging up there and we are trapped here turning somersaults!'' Savitsky cried, according to Orlov. ``We are going to hit them hard. We shall die ourselves, sink them all but not stain the navy's honor!''

The submarines' commanders could use conventional torpedoes only on order from the navy chief, and the use of nuclear torpedoes could only be authorized by direct order from the Soviet defense minister, the book said. However, the close surveillance by the U.S. Navy made it hard for submarines to resurface for scheduled communications sessions.

Savitsky eventually controlled his anger and ordered the submarine to the surface. It was dark but the area was brightly lit by searchlights from U.S. ships and a U.S. helicopter buzzing overhead. ``We felt like a wolf hunted down,'' Orlov remembered. ``It was a beautiful but frightful scene.''

Would Kennedy have ordered that done that to a nuclear armed sub? My take is that they didn't know.

Hmmm, there's a interesting outline of the Cuban Missile Crisis by a Steven Van Evera. No references so it's not that useful.

Still I think there's a few points to bring up. First, there was a great deal of uncertainty, ignorance, and miscommunication in play. For example, it is claimed that Kennedy didn't know at the begining that Turkey had a comparable number of US nukes. Castro didn't know about US nuclear superiority. The shooting down of the U2 supposedly wasn't authorized. The USSR didn't expect their deployment to be discovered. And so on. Second, it takes time for a government to come to a decision. Part of the problem with the Cuban Missile Crisis was how fast it unfolded. Neither the USSR nor the US were prepared. Third, there were parties that had the power (though not necessarily authorization) to use nuclear weapons on the spot.

That I will cede handily. But it's not really relevant to my obse

Before I respond concerning very specific policies of the (now defunct) Soviet Union, I would like to have some more substantial corroboration than what you understand to be the case.

My impression is somewhat in error. There were four USSR submarines with nuclear tipped torpedoes in play, but they weren't authorized to use them. It didn't keep one submarine commander from threatening to do so:

The four diesel submarines, which were armed with both conventional and nuclear-tipped torpedoes, sailed from the Arctic Kola Peninsula. They managed to pass unnoticed through U.S. and NATO cordons in the northern Atlantic, but were spotted by the Navy as they approached Cuba. The submarines needed to come to the surface often to charge their batteries, and that made them easy marks for the U.S. anti-submarine cordons around the communist island.

Capt. Valentin Savitsky's B-59 submarine was quickly spotted by Navy patrol aircraft when it appeared on the surface. American destroyers rushed to block the submarine and began dropping stun grenades to force it to resurface, said Vadim Orlov, who was in charge of the submarine's radio intelligence at the time.

``The Americans encircled us and began dropping grenades that were exploding right next to us,'' Orlov was quoted as saying in the book. ``It felt like sitting in a metal barrel with someone hitting it with a sledgehammer. The crew was in shock.''

The bombardment went on for several hours and some sailors lost consciousness as oxygen ran low and temperatures inside the submarine soared above 122 degrees.

After an especially strong explosion shook the submarine, ``Savitsky got furious and ordered an officer in charge of a nuclear-tipped torpedo to arm the weapon,'' Orlov said in the book.

``There may be a war raging up there and we are trapped here turning somersaults!'' Savitsky cried, according to Orlov. ``We are going to hit them hard. We shall die ourselves, sink them all but not stain the navy's honor!''

The submarines' commanders could use conventional torpedoes only on order from the navy chief, and the use of nuclear torpedoes could only be authorized by direct order from the Soviet defense minister, the book said. However, the close surveillance by the U.S. Navy made it hard for submarines to resurface for scheduled communications sessions.

Savitsky eventually controlled his anger and ordered the submarine to the surface. It was dark but the area was brightly lit by searchlights from U.S. ships and a U.S. helicopter buzzing overhead. ``We felt like a wolf hunted down,'' Orlov remembered. ``It was a beautiful but frightful scene.''

Would Kennedy have ordered that done that to a nuclear armed sub? My take is that they didn't know.

Hmmm, there's a interesting outline of the Cuban Missile Crisis by a Steven Van Evera. No references so it's not that useful.

Still I think there's a few points to bring up. First, there was a great deal of uncertainty, ignorance, and miscommunication in play. For example, it is claimed that Kennedy didn't know at the begining that Turkey had a comparable number of US nukes. Castro didn't know about US nuclear superiority. The shooting down of the U2 supposedly wasn't authorized. The USSR didn't expect their deployment to be discovered. And so on. Second, it takes time for a government to come to a decision. Part of the problem with the Cuban Missile Crisis was how fast it unfolded. Neither the USSR nor the US were prepared. Third, there were parties that had the power (though not necessarily authorization) to use nuclear weapons on the spot.

That I will cede handily. But it's not really relevant to my obse

After all, the RIAA simply suggests you drop out of school to pay your fine.

Well at the same time, it's hearsay from an unapologeticly biased source. Wouldn't surprise me that an overzealous RIAA agent said that, but that's a far cry from proof of RIAA policy. Yes, they're douchebags, but this accusation only warrants an allegation. Try divorce court custody hearings. Lots of weakly-supported allegations everywhere, proving that both parties are douchebags, but not necessarily as attrocious as the allegations describe.

In case you missed it, I loosely implied that the author was a douchebag for publishing his weakly-supported accusation. Online rags like that are corrupting journalistic integrity far faster than the RIAA could ever kill music. I at least understand the difference between an implication, an allegation, and an accusation, all of which are leagues away from fact.

After all, the RIAA simply suggests you drop out of school to pay your fine.

It's a really talented and well-written article. It's things like this which need to be published on a mass scale (unfortunately, a college newspaper won't get you anywhere) before we see any change. When extortion of this level of cruelty happens legally, generating awareness is the only way to stop it.

As it is right now, politicians don't even know what the internet or a computer is, how are we supposed to make them defend our rights?

After all, the RIAA simply suggests you drop out of school to pay your fine.

So in this case, I'm sure they'll suggest she not go to post-secondary school and spends her school savings to pay them.

This is why I haven't bought an RIAA registered CD since 2001, and won't. Douchebags.

http://www.riaaradar.com/ ftw.

TFA is moronic. Why? Here's an analogy: you're a librarian at a big university library. You notice there's lots of gaps and empty space on the shelves, so you "condense" things by packing all the books up with no gaps. Hooray, now they all fit in two rooms and you've got a whole room full of empty shelves!

The next day in the mail, a new shipment of 200 new books arrives. You suddenly realize that you're going to either have to put all the new books together in the empty third room, breaking Library of Congress order and making them impossible to find, or reshelve every single book in the library.

Oops.

And *that*, my friends, is why MIT needs a Class A internet address (18.*.*.*).

Do you actually know that Obama's campaign hasn't had takedowns used against them, or are you assuming?

I have to say, looking at youtomb, it's really hard to figure out what McCain is complaining about.

Even if you just search on McCain, the only takedowns I see are Daily Show clips, making fun of him.

Some supporting evidence making it hard to fit this prize into an ideological box...

• Here is a very good essay by Edward Glaeser on the work that got Krugman the prize.
• Here is an essay where Krugman takes a liberal reporter to task for misunderstanding and opposing globalization.
• And here is a somewhat more technical essay on why free trade is better than the alternatives even if your trading partners have horrible records on the environment and labor rights.

In his popular writing, including his NY Times column, Krugman is a pretty outspoken liberal on most issues. But within his academic expertise -- which is what he won the prize for -- he is very willing to depart from liberal orthodoxy if that's where logic and evidence lead him.

Are you this paranoid and racist in real life, or just online?

I guess there's only one way to find out. Parent's real name is Christophe Devriese. His email is Christophe.Devriese@student.kuleuven.ac.be and he attends Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Still feel like publishing your insane ramblings?

Rotating fluids that are perturbed tend to form columns parallel to the axis of rotation called Taylor columns, after G.I. Taylor. On the Earth, these are sometimes seen over seamounts in the oceans, and back when people assumed that Jupiter had a surface, it was hypothesized that the Great Red Spot was a taylor column over an obstruction on the surface below. This now seems highly unlikely, as a solid surface seems highly unlikely. Some more theory is here.

More recently, it has been hypothesized that the belts of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn (which are organized in pairs at opposite latitudes) may be Taylor columns (i.e., that they may extend part or all the way through the planet as cylinders, keeping the same distance from the rotation axis). A Taylor column at the pole could in principle go all the way through the planet, if there was nothing below it, or could mark the size of a rocky core, thousands of kilometers down. Thus my original question.

This explains the idea pretty well :

The proposed atmospheric cylinders were first demonstrated in a series of laboratory experiments 25 years ago to chart atmospheric flow in a wholly gaseous planet. Friederich Busse, University of Bayreuth, Germany, and John Hart, University of Colorado, Boulder, used liquid-filled spheres with high rotation speeds and imposed interior-exterior temperature differences. The experiments showed that the convective and most other disturbances in these fast-rotating spheres of fluid almost always produced cylindrical vortices parallel to the test vessel's spin axis, called Taylor columns.

The TLS standard (effectively SSL 4) mandates that the server present a certificate for perusal by the client. Sure, you can use a self-signed certificate, but then you're not using TLS in a secure fashion.

SSH and Kerberos are not based on SSL/TLS. SSH probably uses similar techniques to SSL, but Kerberos is out there doing it's own wacky thing. See here for an explanation of Kerberos's operation.

If this is an introduction class, remember that your goal is to introduce, not indoctrinate. You aren't teaching and "advanced algorithms" class, you are showing your students a bit about programming what you can do with it.

Starting them off on something that introduces the subject of programming is a good idea, but I wouldn't even start them off on PHP, Python, BASIC, or Pascal, I would start them off on Scratch. It's a product of MIT, it's free, open-source, cross platform, and does an amazing job of showing the basics of event-driven programming. Even to the area of variables, iterations, etc.

Oh, and you can usually get somebody started in 10 minutes or so. It's quite a site to see somebody program a multi-player game full-on with scratch in an afternoon.

I would introduce increasing challenges in Scratch for the first month or so, so that people get a clear understanding of how variables, callbacks, math functions, and algorithms are used before introducing them to a more "real" programming language.

Of course, YMMV, I have no idea what context and environment you are really dealing with...

My $0.02 of free advice.

learn from this physics teaching master at mit:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/VideoLectures/ (mit ocw)

The key is to just explain it, no bs and no assumptions of previous knowledge, then have students solve problem directly relevent.

Maybe now that you are in teaching, maybe you should have a look how others do it, here is an example:

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

I've been watching these for a while now, I liked them (although to much beginner for me, it's a nice way to get to know a 'new' language).

Gerald Sussman and Harold Abelson's MIT course "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is the best beginner's course I've ever seen anywhere. It starts at the beginning and ends up with advanced subjects like closures, and functional composition, building every concept in small pieces with clear examples. Plus the material is freely available, and there's video of Sussman giving the course to a bunch of hilariously dressed HP engineers in the eighties some time.

Gerald Sussman and Harold Abelson's MIT course "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is the best beginner's course I've ever seen anywhere. It starts at the beginning and ends up with advanced subjects like closures, and functional composition, building every concept in small pieces with clear examples. Plus the material is freely available, and there's video of Sussman giving the course to a bunch of hilariously dressed HP engineers in the eighties some time.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The title says it all.

You have to taylor the content to the audience.

Not knowing what age range is your audience makes it difficult to give you concrete
advise.

Avoid the history of computers, most young people (i.e. everyone under 40!) finds
it boring and in reality it is useless.

You can use Scratch as a great tool to introduce
programming concepts without the boring theory.

In general, do not bore your audience, that's the secret.

I read about it in a CS paper from a while ago.

MaBell once told a court that the stealing of a document about 911 system enhancements cost them $79,944. Here's how they got that figure:

Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as follows:

1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.

2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.

3. Two days of editing cost $367.

4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.

5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.

6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.

7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.

Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve- page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.

But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the twelve-page Document.

Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for maintenance. (Actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though mentioned, had been left off the final $79,449 total, apparently through a merciful oversight).

Later in the '90s, Sun Microsystems told the FBI that Kevin Mitnick getting the Solaris source code cost them $80 million, which they never reported to their shareholders, and the source code in question was later given away (under a non-open source license) while Mitnick was still awaiting trial.

RFC 2817 is pretty badly broken - basically you can MITM and drop the Upgrade: header, and various other problems. The real solution for random sites that just want to protect passwords is RFC 5054 SRP-TLS, however it's not well supported at the moment, and Mozilla don't seem to be interested in pushing it, preferring to make excuses about why they're sticking with 10-year old technology.

Most of the electrodes actually follow a sort of etching/electroplating line of operation. You can recondition them buy inverting the energy. Of course you would need to have pumps designed to change with the voltage so that your putting the H into the right container. It would suck to find that your filling the hydrogen with oxygen to the perfect combustion ratios.

It would also be dependent on what materials were being used for the electrodes to how effect this might be. Currently, there are some elements that act as catalysts (cobalt metal, phosphate for the O and platinum for the H) that would reduce the amount of energy needed for the splitting and they were reported to work this way. But I'm not aware of any mass production of them nor are they readily availible yet. Also, I'm not entirely sure what the energy in compared to energy out numbers are. It might still be very inefficient overall but more efficient then past performances.

How do articles keep getting slashdotted when no one ever reads them? (On that note, here is a shortened version of the article.)

"HoloTV" conjures up images of...

- a display much like holograms, but instead with fully moving images (and I don't mean the ones that have moving images when you change the viewing angle)
- a holodeck, but confined to the 'space' of a TV.

Benton et al (mostly et al) did great work, but...
http://people.csail.mit.edu/wojciech/3DTV/index.html ...it is neither of the above.

A lenticular display is cool, but still depends a lot on the viewing angle, very precise registration, etc.

True '3D TV' is quite a long ways out as of yet.. there are plenty of existing and research methods, but all of them have their caveats that make them nowhere near '3D TV' a la "everything actually looks 3D, from any angle, without special glasses required, and without the surfaces appearing translucent, and with no more extreme requirements than a very high-end regular TV now".

red/blue | red/green methods - no color accuracy, need glasses, not actually 3D (fixed viewpoint)
chromadepth - no color accuracy, need glasses, not actually 3D (fixed viewpoint)
shutter glasses - need glasses (dur), not actually 3D (fixed viewpoint)
polarization - need glasses, not actually 3D (fixed viewpoint)

VR glasses - need the big VR goggles.

Lenticular displays - limited viewing angles, not actually 3D (multiple fixed viewpoints - typically on the horizontal plane, MIT's work has the vertical plane covered a bit as well)

Tracking displays - limited viewing angles and, moreover, limited number of viewers (just one.. the person being tracked. Also not really 3D (fixed viewpoints, but with greater 'fluidity' between viewing angles; no actual depth cues (could be combined with a 'glasses' method to overcome this limitation, however). In theory extensible to spherical displays to provide a - albeit awkward - free-viewpoint display).

Collated displays / array of displays - expensive, limited viewing angles (not as limited as lenticular, but if you look at the side of the array of displays, you're not going to see a whole lot), surfaces appear translucent, color inaccurate the deeper 'in' you look.

Spinning surface displays (in various forms) - noisy (even with the spinning surface encased and usually vacuum-sealed; for resistance purposes as well), flickery, surfaces tend to appear translucent although some level of opacity can be attained.

Making the air explode in gorgeous bursts of luminosity - loud. very, very loud.. zero color, not even greyscale; presuming technique perfected to at least allow greyscale (minor vs major bursts, or frequency bursts), surfaces will still appear translucent.

Of all of the above, Lenticular displays are the most commercially successful *right now*, and they're still not mainstream; that might change as more and more 3D movies come out and they start getting stuck on Blu-Ray/whatever, though.

I get the feeling I missed one, but it's likely to have some of the other usual drawbacks.

Overall, VR goggles give the best experience as long as the content is actually 3D.. but people don't like wearing even the little polarized glasses, nevermind a VR headset.

--

On top of that, though... shooting a movie in a stereoscopic format (glasses) is difficult enough; a lot of movie shots only really 'work' from a single angle - think one actor punching another... move a little right/left and it becomes a lot easier to tell that the guy never actually hit him; gets worse when you add in the original viewing angle and you get full 3D depth cues. That's not to mention any effects that have to get replicated in stereo (double the work; easy if it's a 3D feature film, not so easy if it's live-action and some poor artist has to rotoscope an actor's hair not once, but twice, and with stereoscopic cohesion.
And that's just stereo.. that's not even the common concept of 3D (cameras all around), nevermind full 3D (being able to look all the way around, instead of just orbiting the scene of interest).

No.. it'll be a long, long while more before 'HoloTV' is something we can all talk about the way we did about flatscreen TVs several years back.

A "hack" is not necessarily a negative thing. In fact, most hacks can arguably be called ingenious! Read about the origin of the words "hack" and "hacker": http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html

Sound's like someone has read the Unix-Hater's Handbook

Then, once your tinfoil hat is secured in place, you can begin the tedious process of upgrading to covering your ceiling and walls with tinfoil.

LIES!!! User johndmartiniii (obviously an alias) wants us to use tinfoil as a signal blocker. Fortunately I have found a copy of the study on tinfoil the Reptoid scientific community tried to bury. It's On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the governmentâ(TM)s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

(emaphasis mine)

Nice try johndmartiniii. Now know the brutality of your masters, the Reptoid Illuminati, as you are rendered into their protein vats after they discover the failure of your misinformation campaign.

an instance of Unix - perhaps PC-BSD, or possibly that Finnish fake called Linux. Yes, it's quite possible. I know a 9 year old who installed Kubuntu successfully. He needed to be told the 'phone and IP numbers of the ISP, but that's all. Then connect a green text terminal to it and get them to understand that typing commands does not result in a fate worse than death, you know, something like creating serious laundry problems. Once they get the idea that it's ok to touch a keyboard, they might like to risk having their little minds corrupted by being entertained by one of the GUI oriented packages such as: Alice; Scratch; or perhaps the Squeak Smalltalk E-Toys?

..and most of the challenges have little to do with math. Meanwhile, here's something which could lead to real progress in mathematics (From the Slashdot Firehose):

An anonymous reader writes:

"Cameron Freer, an instructor in pure mathematics at MIT, is working on an intriguing project called vdash.org (video from O'Reilly Ignite Boston 4): a math wiki which only allows true theorems to be added! Based on Isabelle, a free-software theorem prover, the wiki will state all of known mathematics in a machine-readable language and verify all theorems for correctness, thus providing a knowledge base for interactive proof assistants. In addition to its benefits for education and research, such a project could reveal undiscovered connections between fields of mathematics, thus advancing some fields with no further work being necessary."

link

This article is mostly fluff from past 5 years. No mention of the Morris Worm . Article definately written by a poseur .. .

Remember that someone flew a small plane into the White House (almost) during the Clinton administration.

http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N40/crash.40w.html

There were breakouts conducted at the Marion Ill. Supermax during the 80s with a helicopters, so I'm sure that scenario, along with the Secret Service's penchant for planning and a history of lone nutjob attacks on Truman, JFK, Ford, the Capital, Reagan, Clinton made Redeye and Stingers a part of the arsenal long before 9-11.

Linear programming with n variables and m constraints (n not necessarily equal to m) involves solving up to $C_n^m$ times a series of p x p matrices, with p= min(m,n). The usual algorithm is the simplex , which is indeed not that hard but not up to high school level. You need a good command of linear algebra to really understand it, especially the corner cases. A very bright 10-12th grader could probably understand it and program it too. However, an efficient way to solve LP was not found until 1984, so LP is not that easy.

Now the article is about LP with integer constraints (i.e. integer programming or IP). This is much harder. There are no known efficient way to solve IP. The whole field of combinatorial optimisation is not taught until university after a good course on linear algebra and discrete mathematics.

also, don't forget the world's possibly best-written programming book: SICP.

How so? Please be more specific.

Joe Lieberman and his staff have been actively censoring youtube under the guise of Senate Bill 1959: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 since May. The bill hasn't passed the Senate yet, but it hasn't stopped Lieberman from pressuring google to delete any video and accounts he wants.

This video describes what is going on pretty well.

This veteran gives Lieberman a piece of his mind on the issue.

MIT has been trying to track down what videos are being taken down and why.
http://youtomb.mit.edu/

...and this asshole thinks he's so fucking important, he lectures you about how to thank him so he can delete your acknowledgment/thank you as quickly as possible.

he seems important enough if you decided to write a post on /. whining about his abrasive attitude (and probably lost some sleep over it -- how dare he, that asshole!). and he seems efficient too.

this sort of behavior is common in IT, no? I figured people got used to it by now. you should read up on nerd tact filters before you act all butthurt about it in public.

ps: fuck you.

This seems like a rehash of Prof Yvo Desmedt's Things that Think project from MIT's media lab.

They have been focusing on the security and privacy impact of networked / intelligent devices since the mid 90s.

Hopefully these guys will be included (there's no mention of them in the article) as they've already looked at a lot of the key problems and solutions.

This seems like a rehash of Prof Yvo Desmedt's Things that Think project from MIT's media lab.

They have been focusing on the security and privacy impact of networked / intelligent devices since the mid 90s.

Hopefully these guys will be included (there's no mention of them in the article) as they've already looked at a lot of the key problems and solutions.

Start running a fab lab for the campus community - use a grant/your budget to get a laser cutter, vinyl cutter, desktop cnc router, and some soldering irons, and let students use them on their personal projects. This is already going on on other campuses and at community centers.

The best introduction is Neil Gershenfeld's book Fab. Carleton Library doesn't have a copy but email me, (penguin at supermeta dot com), and I'll lend you mine, I'm in Ottawa.

Start running a fab lab for the campus community - use a grant/your budget to get a laser cutter, vinyl cutter, desktop cnc router, and some soldering irons, and let students use them on their personal projects. This is already going on on other campuses and at community centers.

The best introduction is Neil Gershenfeld's book Fab. Carleton Library doesn't have a copy but email me, (penguin at supermeta dot com), and I'll lend you mine, I'm in Ottawa.

One of the most valuable services you can provide is your collective clue, available at a meat-space location. Some of the other suggestions (providing virtualization support, teaching classes on various aspects of computing, security hygiene), are great ideas and will definitely help the community. An actual physical place where people with an interest in computing and hacking (in the good sense of course) can just gather, work, bounce ideas off each other and help the community, is rare, and something the web can't provide. Having a group like that SIPB was invaluable to me, when I was an undergraduate, by being a concentration of people with such interests. And since we were located right next to the main computer cluster/lab, we were also able to help other members of the community on a wide range of computing topics.

http://stuff.mit.edu/sipb/

The Student Information Processing Board at MIT really has what you're looking for. All sorts of advanced services for students and lots of education from Haskell to hacking to LaTeX. They do a lot and do a pretty damn good job at it too.

A word of warning though, if you ever needed to fulfill a stereotype about nerds look no further than their ample Linux Beards. These guys mean business.

http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)
http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/
http://srfi.schemers.org/
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
http://www.quickref.org/
http://java.sun.com/javase/reference/api.jsp
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.stackoverflow.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://yutaka.is-a-geek.net/
http://www.gotapi.com/
http://www.open-rsc.org/
http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/resource.htm
http://www.geocities.com/orion_blastar/contact/
http://en.wikibooks.org/

don't forget that MIT has had many more courses available for a good while now

MIT and CMU too.

Measuring just by number of courses offered is a bit bogus though; some courses are just a stack of lecture slides which, without seeing the lecture they go with, are a less informative than a library book (example).

I applaud the universities running these projects, it's all good stuff. All I'm saying is 'number of courses offered' isn't the only measure of success; making the material complete and comprehensible is important too!

Good info on Stanford. In addition, don't forget that MIT has had many more courses available for a good while now:

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

And many schools/universities have their material online. Try Google.

Those with thin wallets and empty pocketbooks can get a decent education as long as they have the time, the will, and with free access to a computer (via public library for example).