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A program of geothermal resource characterization, focused research and commercial-scale demonstrations could mean large-scale geothermal power generation within the next 10 to 15 years

of hacking at MIT.

According to this, it wasn't the royalties, it was that MIT demanded equity in the startup.

To paraphrase the argument, MIT its entitled to royalties, which are tied to the value of the patent, but not equity, since the company's value is more than just the patent (unless that company exists only to hold the patent).

There is no right to privacy.

BS! As early as the early 1800s the USSC ruled there is he right to privacy, specifically anonymity. Among other's the right to privacy is grounded in the First Amendment's Freedom of Speech clause. In one case, the 1960 case of TALLEY v. CALIFORNIA, 362 U.S., the US Supreme Court struck down a Los Angeles city ordinance that made it a crime to distribute anonymous pamphlets. An MIT page, describes this ruling and another, McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission, wherein the USSC upheld anonymous speech. In the Talley v California case the court said:

"Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all.... Even the Federalist Papers, written in favor of the adoption of our Constitution, were published under fictitious names. It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes."

Might just be that she is part of the MIT wearable computing project. http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/. I am really fed up with all of the people that think that our daily lives should be ruled by the fear of terrorists.

http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/

http://www-nishio.ise.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/~tsutomu/

Personally, I think they overreacted. Seems to be a pastime in that neck of the woods like this 'fake bomb' arrest: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html. It may be that blinking LED's are too flash for that neighborhood.

All tech men (and women, apparently) carry batteries!

None of your links seem to work, but here are a few of mine:

Not a bomb.
Not a bomb.
Not a bomb.
Not a bomb.
Not a bomb.
Not a bomb.
Not a bomb.

Bombs tend to have an explosive payload of some kind, and they also tend to be too heavy to simply dangle from a shirt without some means of securing them. I'm surprised AIRPORT SECURITY doesn't know this. I am also alarmed at the "assume something is a bomb until proven otherwise" mentality.

It was a bunch of wires sticking out of a breadboard. I know people in general aren't that bright, but come on. We aren't talking about a to-scale gun replica here.

First year Physics at MIT, UT and WSCC http://web.mit.edu/8.01t/www/syllabus.pdf http://dox.utdallas.edu/syl8645 http://www.wscc.cc.tn.us/science/Science%20Dept/Physics%20Dept/PHYS2111SYL&ATT.pdf

The coop is now barnes and noble. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1995/coop-0913.html

It's horrendously overpriced as well.

IMHO the future direction taken with Kerberos should be merging the protocol into LDAP (e.g. for the future LDAPv4 revision of LDAP protocol).

Here's my rationale behind this: The problem with Kerberos being a distinct protocol from LDAP is that the distinction causes lots of confusion among the implementors, system architects, developers and administrators. This results in lots of cases where the two protocols are misused.

The correct distinction should be that you use Kerberos for authentication (that is, proving that a user is someone he claims to be) and LDAP for authorization (that is, given an authenticated user, determining information related to granting access to some resources - such as group memberships, possibly some application-specific ACLs etc) and for other data for which a directory is useful (hard to list all possible uses of LDAP, but e.g. mail aliases are a fine example).

But because the protocols are separate and very hard to setup together on a single authentication/authorization/directory server (or a group of servers!), people go along with only one of them, usually using LDAP for authentication instead of Kerberos (see mod_auth_ldap for Apache), effectively prohibiting themselves from implementing usable single sign-on

For an example, let's have a look at available OSS solutions. Apache Directory has Kerberos and LDAP integrated from the start, but it's painfully slow as a server at its current state. A mail server using LDAP for aliases can perform quite a bit of hammering on the LDAP server. MIT Kerberos cannot use LDAP databases. So doesn't Shishi Kerberos, although they plan implementing this in the future. That leaves us with Heimdal Kerberos. Heimdal requires the LDAP server to be on the same machine and support LDAPI connections. So that rules out Fedora Directory Server, whose stable version 1.0.4 doesn't support LDAPI yet (although the CVS development version recently got LDAPI support, finally).

I've tried setting up a Heimdal Kerberos server with OpenLDAP (with SASL2 daemon in the middle), and succeeded, but it was a royal pain in the *ss.

All HOWTOs I've found on the web described a brain-dead design where Kerberos maintains a classic file-based database on its own, separate from OpenLDAP database, and one has to make sure they both are in sync (because it's possible that one can have a user that the other doesn't). In such a setup replication is really troublesome and has to be done using 2 different channels and mechanisms (e.g. LDAP syncrepl + Kerberos' own redundant servers).

I wanted an integrated design, where Heimdal stores its data directly in OpenLDAP.
This way, I couldn't possibly create a Kerberos account without an LDAP account (well, I could if I omitted Kerberos objectclass and attributes, but it would be harder to do and easier to detect). Also, I could use only LDAP's replication mechanisms and easily provide fault-tolerant cluster of LDAP and Kerberos servers.

Unfortunately, the diagram for this setup looks quite daunting for a beginner implementor, as you can see for yourself.

There were also lots of gotchas:

• Heimdal can connect to LDAP as its database only using LDAPI - a networkless LDAP connection over UNIX domain socket. So you have to configure OpenLDAP in a quite non-standard way, and latest

The secret is out! Investigators are looking into whether or not millions of scientists have been using modified versions of SCIgen for their work. The FBI and Department of Termpaper Security have acknowledged the investigation but declined to speculate on the alleged ties between SCIgen and grammar terrorists citing a new law just passed by pResident Bush which allows warrantless underwear tapping.

Authorities are also investigating the connections between Malda, Bush Laden, Bill Gates, Dvorak and Borat SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

The secret is out! Investigators are looking into whether or not millions of scientists have been using modified versions of SCIgen for their work. The FBI and Department of Termpaper Security have acknowledged the investigation but declined to speculate on the alleged ties between SCIgen and grammar terrorists citing a new law just passed by pResident Bush which allows warrantless underwear tapping.

Authorities are also investigating the connections between Malda, Bush Laden, Bill Gates, Dvorak and Borat SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

I am, but the difficulty I've been facing is getting an idiot's introduction to it. Not an idiot's introduction, but one that doesn't assume prior knowledge. A little outdated, but that's the basic idea.

I totally agree with you. Technology often doesn't enhance the abilities of the learner, but instead enhances the abilities of a good teacher. Let's use Walter Lewin's Lectures as an example.

He doesn't need high tech gadgets to make his point. He uses 3 chalkboards and a demo that applies to the lecture each time, and I found it to be one of the most educational and fun classes I've ever taken. As a result, I think I remember it better than most of my other classes.

I saw Mr. McLurkin give his presentation here in Ottawa. Fascinating stuff. Each component of the swarm is very dumb, with very little storage. If you want to store a location for future reference, it's very easy; park a robot there.

All the robots have a sound system, though; the first thing Mr. McLurkin did during his presentation was to have a single robot request that 6 other robots follow it, and the swarm picked and allocated 6 robots, and they all went off in a chain, singing "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go".

Check out James McLurkin's website for some presentations and videos:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/jamesm/

You can read more about this research and see some videos of the robots in action here.

More efficient is a possability, but I suspect that once you throw in the differential and CV joints you'll lose the weight and cost advantages.

True, but you're not going to loose that much power in a differential, and you might want to have CV joints anyways to keep the weight of the motors as sprung rather than unsprung weight.

A quick search says that a differential will be 94-97% efficient. From looking at different efficiency graphs, such as on this site, you can have percentage differences of greater than 5% between different electric motors, within their optimal power zones.

Personally, it sounds like something for a design team to look at. Don't forget that you'll most likely be looking at hub motors if you're going for direct wheel drive, they're less efficient than a similar power traditional motor with a shaft.

You might be able to figure all this out with a proper design team and simulations, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they ended up building prototypes to test it out.

The acceleration is could be a big deal. That's based on the flat power curve of an electric motor and it's ability to operate from a standstill. While a gasoline engine is still slipping the clutch (or torque converter) to avoid stalling, the electric is applying 100% torque. The acceleration will probably be a selling feature in the U.S. There's a lot of misperception that electric cars will feel like driving a golf cart.

Agreed. Especially given that electric motors tend to be more efficient the larger they are, under powering the motor doesn't make much sense.

I can well imagine dealers having a demo car with the traction control shut off so they can demonstrate that the car can burn rubber. Because a lot of people don't realise that burning rubber means lost acceleration, there will probably be an aftermarket (legit or gray) for the firmware that lets you do that.

I don't doubt that, though I think that most people willing to change out their car's chips to 'increase performance' will quickly figure out that burning rubber is counterproductive for both fuel economy and acceleration rates. I wouldn't underestimate the knowledge of the average nascar loving hot-rodder. Not that they wouldn't think that spinning tires is cool, but that they'd know that it's not the best way towards acceleration and plan accordingly. Maybe with a switch turning traction control on or off.

"AD is just a Borgified kerberos"

I'm sorry, but this statement is incorrect.

Active Directory is a Directory Service. Kerberos (or, more properly, Microsoft's implementation of it), is a network authentication protocol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_service

http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/

This was done 9 years ago: http://web.mit.edu/macdev/asciiMac/, and won the Best Hack (and Victor A-Trap) award at MacHack '98.

You are exactly right and this is backed up by the home page for c-store. It says: "C-Store is a read-optimized relational DBMS " - c-store is the open source project that apparently is the basis for Vertica - Stonebraker's commercial offering.

you should check out the "structure and interpretation of computer programs"
by abelson & sussman

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ : the book in html
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-s ussman-lectures/ : video of lectures

these are the folks that invented scheme, a powerful lisp variant that can
be used for functional programming

very cool stuff, if a bit mind-blowing at first.

to be a bit stodgy and academic, lisp/scheme are
fundamentally based on a different *model of computing* than most languages
- the lambda calculus instead of turing machines -
so it takes alot to wrap the head around..

Watch the video lectures, drink some tea and chill out over the course of a few
months, return to it again. rome was not built in a day, etc. you wont regret it.

you should check out the "structure and interpretation of computer programs"
by abelson & sussman

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ : the book in html
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-s ussman-lectures/ : video of lectures

these are the folks that invented scheme, a powerful lisp variant that can
be used for functional programming

very cool stuff, if a bit mind-blowing at first.

to be a bit stodgy and academic, lisp/scheme are
fundamentally based on a different *model of computing* than most languages
- the lambda calculus instead of turing machines -
so it takes alot to wrap the head around..

Watch the video lectures, drink some tea and chill out over the course of a few
months, return to it again. rome was not built in a day, etc. you wont regret it.

My vote for best introduction-to-programming book goes to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (a.k.a. The Wizard Book) by Hal Abelson, Jerry Sussman, and Julie Sussman.

If you are trying to carry out some sort of electrically large scattering problem through inhomogeneous anisotropic materials - you are in for a tough ride. Unless you can approximate things away furiously you will soon find the problem computationally intractable.

It sounds to me as though you really need to get a feel for the basics before embarking on anything too heavy. Time spent in reconnaissance is rarely wasted. Once you have an intuitive idea of how things work you will probably better understand the problem - hence be able to pick an appropriate solver.

A good general starting point in my opinion (particularly in the scalar case) is the use of pseudospectral methods. These will allow you to describe the field propagating through materials in a reasonably tractable manner - they are not too much effort to understand, reasonably quick thanks to the magic of FFTW and surprisingly robust.

I suspect your problem breaks down into three distinct domains:

1. Getting the excitation field to the interaction region
2. Modelling the (potentially complicated) interaction of the field with the surface
3. Getting the field back from the interaction region to the detector.

Since the excitation is presumably beam-like, a pseudospectral technique (particularly one with coordinate scaling) will probably help with 1) and 3). With finite difference techniques you must model the field step-by-step through space. With FFT methods you can jump from one plane to the other - this can be orders of magnitude faster than finite difference.

How you manage 2 is the tricky part! The detail of this will depend strongly on what the material interaction is (e.g. will a scalar approximation suffice). I highly recommend you read Weng Cho Chew, Waves and Fields in Inhomogeneous Media for some pointers. Other things to look into:

1. Green's function techniques (see, e.g. Martin et. al. for an accessible start point).
2. Transfer matrix methods (see, e.g. Barns and Pendry)
3. Discrete dipole scattering (see, e.g. Bruce Draine's DDSCAT)
4. Multiple multipole methods (see, e.g. C. Hafner
5. Finite Difference Time Domain (e.g. see the excellent MEEP from MIT) (see my warning below)
6. Basis expansions and stratified media (similar to transfer matrix) see. Chew for details)

A

There is at least one good-quality GPLed FDTD solver:

    http://ab-initio.mit.edu/wiki/index.php/Meep/

Also, if you are working in the geometric optics limit then you may be able to purchase or adapt an existing ray tracer.

FDTD doesn't have to be expensive - in fact the guys at MIT are nice enough to have published their own implementation under GNU GPL (see http://ab-initio.mit.edu/wiki/index.php/Meep). Installs on Linux and has a feature list rivaling commercial packages. We have used it successfully for simulating various nanophotonic structures.

"What website uses real media these days anyway?"

The BBC for one.

Plenty of good info and suggestions...I am will check some of the items suggested. I did not see any reference to the "Leadership Challenge" by Kouzes and Posner...by far the most helpful "soft' book we studied in grad school.

http://www.leadershipchallenge.com/WileyCDA/

Also, take the suggestions for enrolling in managerial finance and accounting classes to heart. That was singularly my slowest learning curve...expense or asset?...depreciation and tax shelters...metrics & capital proposal/financial evaluations...well-priced (free!) MIT courseware regarding managerial finance (among other subjects) is available here:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/inde x.htm

Check out the Sloan link...

GodSpeed!

History: ARPANET & BBN ~1967~ http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/Abstracts/Terje Rasmussen.pdf

Basically the backbone of the internet started with a US 1960s cold-war requirement to build a highly robust and survivable telecommunications network for reliable delivery of data/content traffic from a source to a specified destination. LAN/WAN concepts were understood as well as requirements for protocols like TCP/IP for routing and delivery of content. Then Tim Burner-Lee at CERN in EU was the creator of the initial WWW protocols and the first website in the world was at CERN on 1991/08/06. Now that I provided credit to ....

The internet purpose was valid, but has been forgotten by DoD and other money bag sources. The security fear has created (I believe) tunnel vision and a total lack of wit to look at past lessons-learned and solutions provided as having technology application value to today's network security survivability problems (no surprise).

Internet purpose:
1. Essential task to transfer data reliably from source to destination.
2. Average transit time should be less than half a second.
3. Subnets should operate autonomously.
4. Hardware should be robust and reliable.

Baran's theory was distributed communications/networks (LAN/WAN) signified many switching nodes and many links attached to each node. The system built in a high degree of network redundancy to make it more difficult to isolate users. Knocking out some nodes could not paralyze the whole network. The improbability of network communications through long-distance networks was thereby highly probable (with the right protocol usage). Store and forward switching which Baran adapted, made it possible for information to follow different routes to its destination. Each 'message block' was labeled with
information about addressee and address, and this was passed on from one switching node to another, this was to be called packet switching. Messages were in digital form and could be ... [anyway you can read the rest for yourself RTF-URL/*.pdf].

My Point: I strongly agree with Dvorak, "Don't trust" any single point of failure architectures. DoD and others are so damn focused on control of architecture (hardware and software) and management of networks that all the chickens and eggs are being put into one basket (point of failure). I call it a "point of failure" or at least a very limited number of "point of failure" architectures. This type of architecture provides an "easy to defend" false sense of security, but is without doubt an easy Enemy-Cracker-Target (ECT). Cracker-Weapon technology and applications can be developed with a specificity breaching any of many perceived/potential weak points of defense. Figuratively the breach would be like a dam-failure flooding the common community valley.

Many small diverse LAN architectures of ~50 users behind a poxy-server, router/switch, firewall ... using PTP encryption with multiple servers/platforms, operating systems, applications ... OSS & proprietary (I think) could be configured in to far larger networks with greater robustness, survivability, and security. The one-way model ain't never the best, but it makes folks feel more in control, which is never a reason to feel secure.

Yes, the management of such a network would cost more, but if security is more than a complex-password and PGP/PKI, then DoD and others in IT engineering and hardware/applications development may need to rethink the single point of failure architecture as a sensible strategy for security.

Nope. You fell in the same hole as Greider did.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/hotdog.html

Big companies like Lenovo being bought out by China, or more recently the US government blocking China from buying Unocal (US blocking on average 10% of US companies being bought up by China).

You might have missed in those news the strange fact that employment in China's manufacturing sector is actually falling.

BTW - an insightful book wrote two centuries ago might be more relevant to what happens now than a flashy prattle of dumb journalists, who even if traveled, are typically ignorant. Here's a good example of one:
The Accidental Theorist All work and no play makes William Greider a dull boy

-A study at West Virginia University concluded that "the process of creative destruction unleashed by Wal-Mart has had no statistically significant long-run impact on the overall size and profitability of the small business sector in the United States"

-The Ludwig von Misis Institute concluded that Wal-Mart significantly contributes to the wealth of a community

-Mississippi State University concluded that there are "both positive and negative impacts" on the local stores when a Wal-Mart is built

-MIT concluded that Wal-Mart benefits the poorest segments of the population the most

-The University of Missouri concluded that a Wal-Mart does far more economic damage to neighboring towns that it didn't build in compared to the towns where they build a new store

From my recent experience driving through Hays Kansas, I tend to believe these reports more than those who claim that Wal-Mart destroys the community.

I worked on the RAW project as an undergrad and started work on a shared memory network for it. The interconnect is actually controlled as part of the instruction set just like the processors. Back then it was only 16 cores on a chip. The way I setup the shared memory network was to use the edge processors to act as the controllers for the off chip memory they were connected to. The other processors would send requests for reads and writes to the appropriate edge processor. I'm sure that their current method is significantly different than what I designed.

Each processor had some cache and there was also a special messaging network used to get to off chip non-shared RAM.

If you really want to get into the details:
http://cag-www.lcs.mit.edu/raw/documents/index.htm l

Hrm. According to this, the core ideas in this startup's work were discussed publicly at least as early as 1996.

Heck, they were in Scientific American in '99. Any chance you might have caught the article?

Actually, I had two facts mixed up in my head.

1) China executes computer-using criminals (media reported as hackers) who embezzled money:
http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6095/student-papers/fa ll97-papers/kim-crime.html (search for "Shi Biao", or just Google "hacker Shi Biao")

2) China treats those who bypass its censorship harshly:
http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/147/

Somewhere I got the idea that the "hackers" were executed for bypassing the Great Firewall. My mistake. However, China -does- punish those who bypass its censorship controls and thus I think my original point remains valid; anyone that receives lists of proxy servers is in danger of being harassed by the government for it.

Roofnet is better than skynet: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/papers/roofnet:mobicom 05/roofnet-mobicom05.pdf

The 9th Circuit Court processed (the courts say "terminated") 13,424 cases in 2006. That's right, over thirteen thousand. Out of thirteen thousand, 22 cases were heard by the Supreme Court, and 19 were reversed. That is not a bad record.

Data here (choose 9th Circuit) and here (choose 2006).

Also, note that the appeals process is designed to overturn incorrect decisions. For an example of this, see the statistics at this page. Note the percentages of cases that are reversed or vacated for all courts.

The percentage of overturned cases should be higher for the Supreme Court, as they get to decide whether to review cases or not. This means they will mainly choose cases where they think they need to correct a bad decision, clarify a law, etc. So, having a high percentage of cases overturned by the Supreme Court means that the Supreme Court is doing its job well, not that the other courts are doing a bad job.

And thought this was "MIT to Invest Over $500 Million in Video Games." Oh well, at least they made Clocky.

Don't blame the industries solely. There have been repeated attempts to organize robust encryption in network protocols, for use in data storage, and for various basic computer operations. On the corporate side, it tends to run headlong into the US encryption export regulations, which deal with encryption technologies as materials of war and keep us all safe by trying to make sure we don't provide any to anyone else unless they promise, honest and for real, that they are allowed to have it.

If you've never dealt with this, go try to download the Kerberos source code, at http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/dist/index.html. While the regulations against exporting encryption have already been ruled unconstitutional at least once, they were simply transferred to another regulatory department and are once again winding their way through the courts,and have been for years.

The desire by various software vendors to have robust built-in encryption and its kissing cousins, authentication and DRM, are the force behind the "Trusted Computing" tools by Microsoft. The desire to have central control over a registered database of keys that can be accessed at any time by law enforcement or governments, at any time they wish and by any authority they can bring to bear, explains why they use the approaches they've published. Centralized keys for everyone's machines in a Microsoft signed master repository, with the master keys able to unlock or revoke other keys, is at the heart of the technology.

It may be extremely helpful to prevent this kind of casual hackery: the technology is being built into the latest Intel and AMD CPU's. But you should be very, very frightened of the centralized database and who has official and unofficial access to it.

I found this a very interesting read. A Brief History of ClarisWorks As someone who had a small part in the ClarisWorks software, it is indeed a sad day. What Bob Hearn and the two Scott's (Scott Holdaway and Scott Lindsey) accomplished was amazing. Later others joined the team. These guys were devastatingly talented engineers. Microsoft was constantly trying to hire these guys away from Claris. Later after Bob and Scott left, they did hire away a lot of the development team.

The integration in ClarisWorks was amazing in the way you could seamlessly embed frames inside one another. I remember a QA tester writing up a bug because a development version crashed due to low memory when a thousand (or something like that) spreadsheet frames were inserted into a footnote of a word processing document. Spreadsheet frames in a footnote! Now that's integration!

Here is a fascinating history of ClarisWorks from one of its original authors. It was quite an accomplishment to pack all that functionality into a megabyte of RAM. Ahh... nostalgia...

I can definitely sympathize with you - in HS I was taking honors Physics, AP Calculus, etc, and my parents & counselors freaked out when I wanted to take the architectural/mechanical drawing "blow-off" classes that the vocational students took. However during my senior year in HS, the drawing instructor hooked our class up with an AutoCAD class at a local community college where (as an engineer) I learned schools that I'm using 20 years later!

But regarding your other mechanical skills: did you not learn tool-skills in college? We had to learn all sorts of tools (bandsaw, lathes, milling machines, torque-wrench, drill press, CNC machining, injection molding) various design projects and I figured the curricula at other engineering schools would be similar.

We did have the opportunity to learn welding (and I did watch welding being performed up close and personnel on several occasions), but unfortunately I never got around to learning how to do it myself. That was one of my few regrets at graduation.

I'll be swapping out the driver's-side driveaxle in my car later this week. Don't worry about breaking something - just chalk it up to another learning experience!

I can definitely sympathize with you - in HS I was taking honors Physics, AP Calculus, etc, and my parents & counselors freaked out when I wanted to take the architectural/mechanical drawing "blow-off" classes that the vocational students took. However during my senior year in HS, the drawing instructor hooked our class up with an AutoCAD class at a local community college where (as an engineer) I learned schools that I'm using 20 years later!

But regarding your other mechanical skills: did you not learn tool-skills in college? We had to learn all sorts of tools (bandsaw, lathes, milling machines, torque-wrench, drill press, CNC machining, injection molding) various design projects and I figured the curricula at other engineering schools would be similar.

We did have the opportunity to learn welding (and I did watch welding being performed up close and personnel on several occasions), but unfortunately I never got around to learning how to do it myself. That was one of my few regrets at graduation.

I'll be swapping out the driver's-side driveaxle in my car later this week. Don't worry about breaking something - just chalk it up to another learning experience!

I can definitely sympathize with you - in HS I was taking honors Physics, AP Calculus, etc, and my parents & counselors freaked out when I wanted to take the architectural/mechanical drawing "blow-off" classes that the vocational students took. However during my senior year in HS, the drawing instructor hooked our class up with an AutoCAD class at a local community college where (as an engineer) I learned schools that I'm using 20 years later!

But regarding your other mechanical skills: did you not learn tool-skills in college? We had to learn all sorts of tools (bandsaw, lathes, milling machines, torque-wrench, drill press, CNC machining, injection molding) various design projects and I figured the curricula at other engineering schools would be similar.

We did have the opportunity to learn welding (and I did watch welding being performed up close and personnel on several occasions), but unfortunately I never got around to learning how to do it myself. That was one of my few regrets at graduation.

I'll be swapping out the driver's-side driveaxle in my car later this week. Don't worry about breaking something - just chalk it up to another learning experience!

Not to mention, with the amount of highly skilled people at their company they could probably even come up with some applications for automatic generation of depositions, interviews, and even legal briefs and motions. Kinda like those kids from MIT created an automatic paper generator a few years ago and actually got a couple of conference acceptances. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ How can you lawyer a company into submission that has, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of lawyers at their disposal for dollars a day? They could completely bog down the legal system if they wanted to.

Admit it, you took that idea from Accelerando