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

Hi SICP looks really interesting is there a PDF/offline edition. Living in Australia I will have to see if there is a local supplier of the dead-tree edition. Thanks.

Here's a pdf conversion of SICP from the html; for über-portability, of course, just buy the book.

SNOBOL - http://www.snobol4.org/

Logo - http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/logo/programming.html

FORTH - http://www.phact.org/e/forth.htm

Prolog - http://www.logic.at/prolog/faq/faq.html

Algol - http://www.algol68.org/

Lucid - http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Lucid

PL/I - http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/resource.htm

If it's scheme you're looking for, there's R5RS and the SRFIs; also, don't forget the world's possibly best-written programming book: SICP.

I actually do disagree with the Supreme Court,

So do I but not about anonymity, democracy requires it.

Second, you strike out on two of the three sources you try to cite as supporting evidence.

Did you also check the cases referred to in them? Either way try this:
Supreme Court upholds anonymity in political speech.

Finally, Jefferson had no hand in writing any of what was published as the Federalist Papers

I didn't say he did, however he was a Founding Father.

So, you don't think you have the right to be anonymous, will you feel the same after you've been fired for your political speech? And why stop there? Have election officials give out receipts on how you voted as well, then when you don't vote the way your employer demands they can fire you. After all anonymity isn't needed.

Falcon

Indeed. They should take advantage of the open-source textbooks that already exist... either by simply selecting one for their purposes, or putting together the best pieces from various sources into a coherent textbook that serves their purposes. Here are the open-source textbook (or related information) sites I'm aware of:

Pointers to Textbooks and Content:
http://textbookrevolution.org/
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Books

Some available lecture notes:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#languages
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/

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

Here, actually.

Right here folks: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/blackhole-view-0903.html

I meant to include this too. Scratch, created by MIT , is a good programming tutor for kids too. You build programs by stacking code blocks together. It would help to teach structure. link: http://scratch.mit.edu/ ps Sorry about subject title. This was my first post to this forum. :)

MIT offers online courses for free, and many of the books they use are available in electronic format. Some of the ones I've seen online textbooks for are the intro to programming and intro to networks. Might be worth checking out.

MIT has their courseware all online. I would start here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/ And if you want to stay with dead trees, I have also found that O'Reilly is hands down the best publisher of computer books. Also, one of the best books for UNIX is Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice J. Bach.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/intro-courses/computers/index.htm

Where are we headed with this exploration of space thing?We study all the planets in the solar system, and we find empty barren pieces of rock. Or maybe a few microbes.

Or, perhaps, the well-behaved plasmas that Voyager found while travelling through the magnetospheres of the outer planets, which gives us another direction to look in the development of practical fusion power.

That's the thing about exploration: If we knew what we were going to find, it wouldn't be "exploration".

...support open source development is that of helping to advance the technology of the human race and benefits of in all the ways it can.
And at the rate that open source can do above and beyond the false constraints of proprietary software.

See more info

The above contents at url has broken links and some outdated info but the general scope is still valid.
The paper only report "hirts_report1.0.pdf" address the failure, of autocoding to identify incompatibility inspired by closed source profit motives. Software packages are difficult to get to work together because of it.

To put it simply: proprietary software development has such incentives and financial motives to intentionally make incompatible (with other softwares) and overly constraining (use constraints) to inherently limit advancement in exchange for direct financial profit, Whereas the open source development direction is such that the benefits and profits to be had is achieved and what teh tool of software can help produce. Teh better the software the better the products that software is used to produce.

Normally I don't post on here, but when people are talking about how the power they are gathering can't be stored permanently I am reminded that we (humans as 'we') just achieved a near 100% effiency rating at splitting Hydrogen and Oxygen from water due to the catalysts that have been discovered by MIT. This was covered on Slashdot recently and I found a Science journal about the topic. To quote: "Researchers have made a major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store energy from the sun. In so doing, they have solved one of the key problems in making solar energy a dominant source of electricity."

1st Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/21155/?a=f
2nd Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html

Let's get that technology out to everyone! The source of the electricity isn't as important as the fact that it will stay in the form of pure hydrogen and pure oxygen for years, centuries, probably longer. That means you have natural batteries because now have methods of taking those sources and making them into usable electricity.

I think it's fair that Angela Belcher has us by the balls...

Could be worse, at least she's not fugly.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/graphics/pubs/siggraph2004_nprcamera.pdf

      Perhaps the previous slashdot story wasn't "old" -- if you count things post-2004 as "new". However, even the paper in the .pdf notes that people have been concertedly using these techniques since 1998, and I happen to know that a lot of the work was pioneered as early as the mid-1940's with depth-maps and stereograms. The new work IS nice, but it's not totally new.

.

Okay, time for some ancient history. Let's begin. Who remembers back when our beloved New Zork Times was running articles about something called Cornerstone a completely worthless database program that nobody was ever going to use? Hmm... it's possible some aren't familiar with the story, so I present: Down From the Top of Its Game. Long story short, Infocom lost huge amounts of money, got absorbed into Activision and disappeared into the ether. Why? Because of destructive, incompetent meddling managment.

Closer to home for a D&D story, remember when TSR started publishing The Honeymooners boardgame and Rocky and Bullwinkle ? Put it another name, has anyone here heard the name Lorraine Williams or wondered why Gary Gygax stopped being involved in D&D?

All I know, is that there have been some... well... odd things coming out of Wizards lately. A ridiculous new alignment system, obviously created in the 9 Hells (the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince people that Lawful Evil doesn't exist). A new D&D system that seems to want to replicate MMORPGs on the tabletop, and a concerted attempt to utterly kill the OGL which someone over there must think was a huge mistake. Well, we'll see where they go. I had some dire predictions following the OWOD apocalypse, but I think White Wolf is still chugging along....

Of course, I'm an odd duck anyway. As a kid, I collected RPGs but hardly ever played them. A deranged monomania that has never made any sense to me. Still, I'm fascinated by watching gaming corporations die... or even subsidiaries.... so I'll be keeping my eye on this.

on the MIT public keyserver

sig 135EA668 Richard Stallman (Chief GNUisance)

http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x894A158D

I think it's a habit of all dying regimes, dying nations and failing groups to engage in surrogate activities.

Americans aren't unique. They're just at the head of this trend in the West. The UK and Canada follow, and after that, mainland Europe.

It's a path to decay you can find outlined here:

The Republic

But it's far easier for people to go into denial, as you can see when a thread whose content is "They are cowards - afraid to look in the mirror. Now some chinese person's going to reply to this and tell me about all the western hypocrisy, but unlike most westerners, they'll never turn their gaze upon themselves." modded up above any more realistic commentary.

Why? It's easier to blame the Chinese than look at our own problems and realize we in the West should clean house first.

Yes! Book recommendations for Perl programmers, outside of the standard ones you need :

• Perl Best Practices, by Damian Conway. This one is really mandatory.
• Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus, to understand why Perl is so powerful.
• How To Design Programs, which taught me better ways of using Perl, even though the book is based upon Scheme.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which is somewhat the bridge between HTDP and Higher-Order Perl.

All the rest I learned from the camel book. I use Perl on three platforms (Win32, Cygwin and Solaris), using the same libraries, and now also adding Perl/TK to the mix.

If you need to define several goals, I would recommend Perl Best Practices for writing maintainable and easy to read code and installing a peer review process.

HTDP is more for individual programmers, to become smarter and better programmers.

... add in "How To Win Friends and Influence People".

Yes! Book recommendations for Perl programmers, outside of the standard ones you need :

• Perl Best Practices, by Damian Conway. This one is really mandatory.
• Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus, to understand why Perl is so powerful.
• How To Design Programs, which taught me better ways of using Perl, even though the book is based upon Scheme.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which is somewhat the bridge between HTDP and Higher-Order Perl.

All the rest I learned from the camel book. I use Perl on three platforms (Win32, Cygwin and Solaris), using the same libraries, and now also adding Perl/TK to the mix.

If you need to define several goals, I would recommend Perl Best Practices for writing maintainable and easy to read code and installing a peer review process.

HTDP is more for individual programmers, to become smarter and better programmers.

Mod parent up.

While I dislike public money going to a bloated legal system, it's about time we lost the shield of protectionism around companies selling broken products to the government under false promises. A 1 billion dollar project should remain a 1 billion dollar project, not bloat out to 10 billion. A secure card system with fundamental known security flaws should not fall to the public to pay for.

We get milked out of countless dollars due to contractors making unrealistically lowball price quotes, then passing on high profit margins at a much higher price once locked in. Or implementing projects and products they know are flawed without disclosing or fixing them. If you look at the presentation, the paper ticket passes aren't even encrypted, and store value locally!

Well, the third slide of their presentation jokes about hoping their talk isn't "evidence in court", and the fifth slide proudly trumpets, "AND THIS IS VERY ILLEGAL!"

I realize that here on slashdot, its fashionable to always err on the side of disclosure in the face of any other concerns, and I can certainly argue myself for the benefits of talking about such issues instead of sweeping them under the rug and pretending they don't exist; the notion that if these students can figure it out, anyone can.* Indeed, many compelling such arguments can be made.

However, there is a balance; namely, that entities, even (especially?) public entities providing infrastructure and transportation services, don't like their vulnerabilities paraded around for all to see. Security through obscurity isn't security on its own, but security through obscurity is a time-tested and reliable component to any system of security, and it is always balanced with cost, difficulty, technical issues, and other concerns.

It's easy to sit here and say that because they were so "cheap", they are getting what they "deserve" by having heroic, bright, geeky MIT students humorously show how they can own them. Has anyone ever considered that public agencies are pulled in n different directions -- including financially and technically -- and sometimes the solution that comes out at the end is simply making the best of what imperfect resources they've got?

When the presenters themselves are not even hiding the questionable legality of what they demonstrate -- even though it's just "talk", like "talking" about how to kill someone with poison, as opposed to doing it -- speech has consequences, and sometimes those consequences will result in things like temporary injunctions, and agencies who serve at the pleasure of the people trying to protect what semblance of security they're able to hold together.

Yes, this is all fun, and clever, and interesting. But why does this seem to be viewed, here, as the MIT students being 100% in the right, and the MBTA being 100% in the wrong?

* This is acually debatable. These are very bright people, and just because they can figure something out, it doesn't at all mean "anyone can". It means people with the means, time, expertise, and will may be able to duplicate what they have done...and will be able to do so a LOT easier when the work has already been done for them.

Yes, just imagine it.

I agree with you. How about these guys?

http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/research/e_conversion.html

They bounced into the news a few weeks ago.

A couple of items of interest displayed at Siggraph this year as well which I think have potential.

Microsoft's come up with a way of painting objects onto an object extracted from a video, then reinserted to the video that remains accurate when the camera angle's changed. Their research paper's called Unwrap Mosaics, and you can see a video on Youtube here (higher quality video on the reseach page).

A company called Image Metrics have made a video with actress Emily O'Brien, using Light Stage technology from USC's Institute of Creative Technologies (an example of this is on a Google presentation called New Techniques for Rendering Human Performances) to create a realistic animated virtual face, that has convinced an editor on VFXWorld that they've passed the uncanny valley. Article is here.

I've been thinking that it was only a matter of time until editing video would become similar to editing photos, I just though it would take a lot more time, but everything is already here. They can even create realistic hair based on photos, just think what technology we'll have in the next decade, this could be in our homes by then.

therefore if your brain is able to moderate it's own actions, you have free will.

So a steam engine with a governor on it, providing a feedback mechanism that moderates its actions, has free will? That's a highly non-standard use of the term.

The best take I've seen on the "dilemma" of free will comes from Raymond Smullyan:

It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you.

What an awful law! Have you tried parsing through the monstrous law that the MTBA invoked in their complaint? I had no idea such a law existed.

Basically, it says that if a hack could obtain anything of value or cause damage/DoS to the hacked computer, you may not tell anyone how to do it. It also says that you owe the computer owner compensation for anything damaged or taken (e.g. unpaid subway fares) as a result of your telling. The law pretends to be limited to important computers, but is so fuzzy that most large computer systems that anyone might want to hack can probably qualify.

I don't envy the EFF their task in defending this case. They may be stuck trying invalidate the law on 1st Amendment grounds. There ain't much sympathy these days for invalidating laws that can claim to keep safe people's health records, bank accounts, and national security data (which is what other parts of this law try to do).

If you want to be appalled, read sections (f) and (g), which say the law doesn't apply to government or to manufacturers of the computers in question. So, not everyone is a criminal, just people.

This is an area of active research in Music information Retrieval. Tristan Jehan's "Creating Music By Listening" is certainly worth a look. Rather than using multiple passes, he suggests that timbrally similar sections of the work may be reused, much like the clone tool in Photoshop.

His paper is also pretty interesting in that it suggests a way for computers to create using perceptual listening algorithms.

The US really shouldn't allow things like in-home laboratories... This is no longer the time for developments the likes of which this guy was involved in. Really, read the second paragraph. Does the US want that kind of person and those kinds of developments occurring in our country again? We need to focus on watching TV a bit better.

I don't see any major damage from having a presentation delayed for all of 72 hours either

Excepting, as pointed out in another reply, that this caused a presentation at a conference to be "Restrained" past the end of the conference, thus causing great damage to both the conference itself (one less presentation, bunch of pissed-off people that came to see said presentation) and the presenters (missed opportunity for a large live audience to present to). Since DefCon lists the presentations ahead of time, the MBTA should have had plenty of time to issue their TRO, get the facts straight, and get on with life such that the presentation could go on. Instead they waited and filed the TRO just prior, in a successful attempt to quash the presentation. Looking back through pages, the wifi warcarting article was posted to Slashdot on the 5th, along with mention of the subway hack presentation, so given normal slashdot posting times, it must have been on the DefCon site since at least late July. And checking further, confirmation: "An MBTA vendor tipped off the authority on July 30 that the talk was scheduled"

The TRO was not filed until the 8th. They knew a permanent injunction would not hold up, so they waited until the last minute to request the temporary one. They had plenty of time, 9+ days, to work with the courts and the presenters and they didnt....

Tm

In this case the judge used a computer intrusion statute. I don't know the terms of it, but some such laws do prohibit trading in passwords or other access devices. Seems like a stretch, and I don't consider it justified, but that might be the reasoning.

According to the complaint the MBTA is calling the CharlieCard and even the CharlieTicket a "computer." Understanding how the "computer" works and disseminating that information constitutes fraud.

According to the referenced US Code, a "computer" is:

the term "computer" means an electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or other high speed data processing device performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions, and includes any data storage facility or communications facility directly related to or operating in conjunction with such device, but such term does not include an automated typewriter or typesetter, a portable hand held calculator, or other similar device;

Direct link to the presentation PDF:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

Direct link to the presentation PDF:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis/
http://mit.edu/aeroastro/www/people/landis/landis.html

You're at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and can not practice simple internet privacy.

elle oh elle to you, good sir.

I agree somewhat; it may be that he has people telling him that "this will enable people to conduct a terror attack" or some other stuff and buys into this post 9/11 patriotact bullshit "everything is different now, even how we interpret the constitution" line of thinking. What's even more clear is that he doesn't seem to understand how technology and digital data work, the data was (and still is) on MIT's website - I am sure his injunction probably didn't cover that, and if it did, kudos to MIT: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

If you want to have a copy of this presentation, the link below is one of the places you can download it:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

Here is the presentation:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

Mirrors:
http://www.evernote.com/pub/ssulistyo/InfoSecStuff#07ff6ce9-1aa9-45e9-8bd2-10ce0805e534
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/77164/anatomy%20of%20a%20subway%20hack.pdf

Also, a vulnerability assessment report:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/vulnerability_assessment_of_the_mtba_system.pdf

The Tech (MIT's student newspaper) is currently hosting a copy of the presentation slides (PDF).

does someone have a copy of the utilities and source code that was posted on their website? please post it.

http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/subway has been removed.

MIT's student newspaper put the "banned" slides online: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

MIT has a prototype.

Look into Chaffing by Ron Rivest.

They already are collecting all wired signals.

And, of course, there are no laws in places for wireless signals - those can be legally picked up by anyone

Physical media was the last safe way to bring data into the US.

The impression that I have is that Gates is someone who likes to take the front stage, and does not mind to talk about bullshit, provided it sounds convincing enough. Does any of his books or has sayings really amount to anything ?

This is basicaly the stage of 'learning a man to fish' instead of giving him a fish.

This sentence shows that Gates is good a reinventing the wheel and saying it as if it really was him who did it.

I have been reading about and practicing creativity courses since twenty years, and it opened my eyes to see that there are many creative possibilities to help 2nd, 3rd and 4th world people. However, creating something creatively is one step, creating it affordable, simple and usable by a whole lot of people is another one. This has been reported on by Slashdot, but there are more such initiatives, sometimes by local universities in the third world. I think that the banks which give help to the poor in India by providing low-rate loans and so on, are also a form of creative capitalism.

It is also always the same with Gates : he likes to sell technological solutions for things which might be better solved first by sociological means (e.g. illiterate people here in Belgium can follow free courses to learn to read and do simple calculations, it is a government (backed) initiative).

The thing that I find most dis-ingenious about Gates statement is this. Since he talks about capitalism, is he himself prepared to invest in projects which have only small long-term gains, or is he just searching for money sink holes which give him big tax breaks ?

Gates is good at setting up smoke screens and making it appear that he has single-handedly invented fire, the wheel and sliced bread, but I do not trust him at all, he should shut up already and exit stage left.

Yes or no: Was the Rodney King case excessive force? Keep in mind he was drunk, coked out, high as fuck on PCP, and was constantly trying to get up and attack the officers even while being beaten.

What evidence do you have that he was under the influence of cocaine or PCP? Tests on him for PCP were negative.

He was trying to break away from men who were torturing him? What a surprise. This one seems to be a favorite of apologists for police brutality: "After we threatened him, he tried to get away, so we had to beat him. And even though we told him not to move, rather than lie there and get beat, he struggled, so we had to beat him some more."

In a situation with a person who is high as fuck on PCP, your only choice is to beat the living shit out of them

Which makes it a perfect excuse for bad cops. "Thought he was on PCP. No choice, had to beat him." Which is bullshit; while PCP causes a disassociated state that render one pretty impervious to pain, it does not cause violent behavior more than other drugs. If someone is on PCP, the best thing to do is avoid anything that might provoke violent behavior.

Well it seems like Prof Nocera has chosen to keep his paper off the internet, or at least his research group's publications list. His invention has already been patented, so that's not the reason. Why is that while academics in physics, maths, and engineering are busily posting copies of their papers or preprints on their websites or arxiv, chemistry academics almost never put up online copies of their papers? It seems like a poor way to go about communicating cutting edge science to me.

Well it seems like Prof Nocera has chosen to keep his paper off the internet, or at least his research group's publications list. His invention has already been patented, so that's not the reason. Why is that while academics in physics, maths, and engineering are busily posting copies of their papers or preprints on their websites or arxiv, chemistry academics almost never put up online copies of their papers? It seems like a poor way to go about communicating cutting edge science to me.