Slashdot Mirror

http://mitworld.mit.edu/
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/

MIT's Open CourseWare has online videos of undergraduate and graduate course lectures of actual math, engineering, physics professors... Many of whom are top researchers in their fields. This is about as brainy as you can get!

For example...

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFal l1999/VideoLectures/index.htm

(humans seem able to send the neural command to catch the ball before our senses could have delivered the signal that it should be caught)

If you are interested in stuff like this, you will like Zen and the Brain and Zen-Brain Reflections by James H. Austin

(humans seem able to send the neural command to catch the ball before our senses could have delivered the signal that it should be caught)

If you are interested in stuff like this, you will like Zen and the Brain and Zen-Brain Reflections by James H. Austin

(humans seem able to send the neural command to catch the ball before our senses could have delivered the signal that it should be caught)

If you are interested in stuff like this, you will like Zen and the Brain and Zen-Brain Reflections by James H. Austin

The Inventor, Gauri Nanda is damn hot! Hot geeky girl inventor :) http://www.media.mit.edu/events/movies/video.php?i d=clocky.rm

No, it's not a hardware limitation, it's a "software thing". Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista do NOT execute 16-bit code in the hardware!

I can't find a reference offhand, but months ago there were reports (and videos) showing a Korean automated turret, capable of using motion tracking to identify something human-sized and moving. A quick YouTube search shows the possibility of sonar-based targeting as well. This experiment shows some ability to identify people and cars in a street scene. So, the technology seems to be just about ready for automatic targeting of humans, if anyone's willing to use it.

Of course the things should have a shutdown code, but we need to use them against human opponents. For political reasons we've become appalled by the thought of human soldiers dying in war, so if we're to fight at all, we need proxies.

You remind me of the guy who tried to convince me that anybody who could drive could learn to fly. Hello! Three dimensions versus two! Absence of road signs! And where are the little dotted lines?

There's more here than "practice". I taught myself to program in language like Fortran and BASIC pretty much by reading the language manuals. In that realm, coding was just a matter of thinking of data as bits and figuring out the right way to use code to tweak the bits. Not that different from doing it yourself with a pencil and paper, just a lot faster.

OOP was a little harder, because it required more abstract thinking. I didn't really get it until I studied C++, because that language allowed me to think of an object as a kind of data structure. Which is precisely why most OOP programming is done in "mixed" languages like C++, Java, and C#, not "pure" OOP languages like Smalltalk.

With functional programming there's yet another level of abstraction, and I've studied it off and on for years. I've never achieved, never even begun to achieve, the skill level I have with procedural and OOP languages. My skill level in languages like Java and Visual Basic is not high (that's why I'm a technical writer instead of a programmer) but at least I can hack out simple utilities and examples. In functional languages, I can't even make change

Every applied science has its scientists (who dream up the basic science), engineers (who turn the abstract science into concrete technology) and mechanics (who tinker with the technology, fix stuff that's not quite working right, and deal with all the low level shit that scientists and engineers are bored by). That's kind of a simplification, especially in computer science, where most people fall into more than one category, and often all three. But in my case, I'm a mechanic, pure and simple. It's taken me a long time to learn my limitations, so don't pretend you understand them better than I do!

Tim Sweeny of Epic has a pdf floating around.

They [ultracaps] certainly don't have the energy density of batteries

Actually, they're getting very close, and right now, there are projects projecting power densities three orders of magnitude higher than batteries, in the 100 KW/kg range. So I don't think the current state of affairs (batteries > ultracaps) is going to obtain for very much longer.

and the largest problem with them is that the discharge from an ultra-capacitor is hard to deal with using normal electronics. It can be compensated for, but it isn't easy.

What? ultracaps have the same discharge curve as any capacitor does; the voltage drops very smoothly as the energy in the cap is dispensed. "Dealing with it" is nothing tricky at all, the technology has been in place for this for literally decades. Modern switching power supplies are *very* efficient at creating constant voltage outputs from all manner of raggedy inputs across a wide range of input voltages, if and when required. They can be engineered to be reliable and very long lasting. This is simply a non-problem. Also, ultracaps can absorb energy (for example, from regenerative braking) at a much higher rate, leading to less wasted energy. We have all manner of high-current switching devices with such low on-resistances these days as to be utterly amazing to an old-timer like me.

I also don't buy the "environmentally friendly" nature of them as well. While they may be better than NiCd batteries or the more traditional Lead-H2SO4 batteries in terms of what they will do to the environment, you can't call them a perfect solution either. The metals used in the construction of these types of capacitors have their own kind of impact on the environment just like any manufactured product.

You're just hand-waving here. Recycling is one issue, toxicity is another, corrosion is another, and all of them are far less critical for ultracaps - not to mention that the lifetime of an ultracap is so much longer (up to a quarter of a milling charge/discharge cycles, or more) than that of a battery, so it is that much more seldom that recycling becomes an issue. It really isn't reasonable to say that ultracaps pose the same kind of environmental issues that batteries do. They don't. Perfect? No. But what is?

If a "Moore's Law" were to apply to battery capacity, instead of the (presumed) 18 month half-life of procesor density and speed, it will be more like 15-20 years instead for improved energy density.

Yes, but (a) ultracaps aren't batteries at all, and (b) ultracaps are increasing in capacity at a prodigious rate, where batteries are not. Mind you, they're coming from behind, but they're a brand new technology with tons of new research driving the improvements, while batteries are not new and many, many avenues have been tried and abandoned for increasing battery capacity for exactly the reason you cite: It is hard to improve the current battery designs.

It's actually a problem. I had a bad experience with Travel Document Systems. I wrote a page on it. Because of SEO type crap, and companies like reputation defender, it is not even showing up. I wish there was some way of dealing with SEO and search engine spam. I'd love to be able to search for reviews, criticisms, and things like that, without having to go through 50 commercial pages advertising products first. Maybe if we could tag pages "noncommercial" and search noncommercial pages, or something?

Oh please, Lindzen [sourcewatch.org] is a well known shill... he has not produced a single peer-reviewed paper in the last 20yrs.

Not according to this list of his publictions.

Here is a list of his publications: http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Publicatio nsRSL.html

"As I made clear, both in the
preliminary discussions, and in the interview itself, I believe that
global warming is a very serious threat that needs equally serious
discussion and no one seeing this film could possibly deduce that.

What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which
there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why
many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely
accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples,
it's hard to know where to begin, so I will cite only one:
a speaker asserts, as is true, that carbon dioxide is only
a small fraction of the atmospheric mass. The viewer is left to
infer that means it couldn't really matter. But even a beginning
meteorology student could tell you that the relative masses of gases
are irrelevant to their effects on radiative balance. A director
not intending to produce pure propaganda would have tried to eliminate that
piece of disinformation.

An example where my own discussion was grossly distorted by context:
I am shown explaining that a warming ocean could expel more
carbon dioxide than it absorbs -- thus exacerbating the greenhouse
gas buildup in the atmosphere and hence worrisome. It
was used in the film, through its context, to imply
that CO2 is all natural, coming from the ocean, and that
therefore the human element is irrelevant. This use of my remarks, which
are literally what I said, comes close to fraud."

Though he did not get jail time, he still was convicted. http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/morris-w orm.html

Watched that? Good.

Now remember that MIT oceanographer? The one they've got on there to say that CO2 doesn't matter because it all comes out of the oceans really anyway?

He was substantially misrepresented, and he's not happy at all about it. I'm especially amused by the manner in which the film maker responds to criticism: 'Go and fuck yourself.'

Yes, a small number of cranks were pushing the global cooling story, while the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists was that it was not going to happen.

Now they're tending upwards, so we're all going to die.

See above, but vice-versa.

Oh, and there was an Ozone Hole, so we're all going to die.

Remember how we all stopped using chlorofluorocarbons?

The ice age ended and the climate changed. Guess what -- animals and people moved along with it.

OK, that works for a few thousand cavemen. Now do it with a billion.

If you were able to watch UK Channel 4's "The Great Global Warming Swindle", it's been pulled from YouTube for copyright issues. Pity. It was spot on.

Not according to Carl Wunsch, the oceanographer featured prominently in that show, who says it misrepresented him completely.

Anyone have something like http://punitive-surgery.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/296/s cimakelatex.17739.TheSkyIsPurple.html#tth_sEc4.2 that will take some key phrases as a seed?

If it's good enough for the question, it should be good enough for the answer =-)

There's no need for a car that goes more than 70mph.

Yeah, because there's nowhere in the United States where the speed limits are faster than 70 MPH.

I use a very old technology 1300cc car

Good for you and your VW beetle/van or whatever. I'm the guy who passed you when your car was struggling to go uphill, and I was still getting 30 MPG and probably putting out less pollution than your tired jalopy.

I personally make sure that every device driver I write includes a use of at least one BCD instruction. My personal favorite is ASCII Adjust after Addition (AAA). I do this primarily to piss off the people who want to use my software on something otehr than an x86 architecture.

http://pag.csail.mit.edu/~adonovan/dilbert/show.ph p?day=8&month=9&year=2003

Go through SICP book. DrScheme is a nice scheme implementation for trying examples in the book. You'll learn to understand some deeper programming concepts, that you problably would not pick up in a few years of random programming practice.

If a programmer wants to create a construct, he sits down with a piece of paper (or whiteboard), charts out what he wants it to do, and writes some code, hopefully (if he has any training) in a nice, orderly manner. If he's any good, he makes it modular and separates concerns so that (say) code for the GUI is not mixed in with code for the filesystem.

Kinda like this?

You can't start from a box of blocks and program up a person yet, but you can certainly customize some E. coli, or order up a modified virus (or build a simple one up from scratch), and that starts out with sitting down and scribbling out a bunch of genetic code. IGEM (linked above) is about developing a kit full of more or less plug replaceable tools and documenting the hooks that they have, much like a software library.

Doesn't that apply just as much to science, especially established scientific theories?

It looks like many quantitative applications are currently not going to work on Vista, at least for now. Major statistical analysis, data mining and Geographic Information Systems tools that don't run on Vista include:

SPSS, SAS, MATLAB and SAP and ESRI ArcGIS

Eh, this is no big deal, right? I mean, who really wants to know about facts and numbers? Especially when you are using a *computer*.

Not sure what CEO pay has to do with corporate abuse. Just because people make more money doesn't mean they are bad. And leaders with shady practices exist in the privately owned business world, with less transparency than corporations.
From your article, CEO pay essentially is tracking the S&P 500, part of which can be explained that they derive a large amount of pay from equity in the company (eg stock options). CEOs are getting compensated according to their job expectations, they grow the value of the company for the shareholders and they are paid accordingly.

If you are interested there is a paper that models CEO pay increases and links it to increasing firm size

I know I'm late with an addition, but.. if you think that's cool - check out this guy:

http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/gallery.html
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/polyhedra.jpg

I know I'm late with an addition, but.. if you think that's cool - check out this guy:

http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/gallery.html
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/polyhedra.jpg

I know I'm late with an addition, but.. if you think that's cool - check out this guy:

http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/gallery.html
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/polyhedra.jpg

Uranium prices have spiked in recent years, as TFA shows. However, comparing prices today with a decade or so back ignores the huge amount of uranium that hit the market after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A more honest comparison would go back several decades.

Another point to consider is that while current steam based nuclear power plants do burn uranium down to an unusable 'waste product', that waste is actually quite useful with reprocessing. So, while it is true that were the world only to burn low-level enriched uranium the world would run out quickly, it is not true that with a more modern burn-reclamation cycle that fuel shortages would persist.

Someone who created the random CS paper generator should make a random generator for profound-sounding articles. Oh wait, Stanislaw Lem thought of that...

The new suit does sound like a suite, so to speak. From the photos it doesn't incorporate an MCP undersuit, which I think is critical for Mars. MCP and constant-volume balloon suits are incompatible, both on the "skin" layer and in the life support system (they have different requirements, generally). For the article it sounds like they will be swapping backpacks and possibly torso segments per task. It still doesn't make the new suits quite right for Mars, but they should work on the moon. Still wouldn't want to drag that much dust into the return capsule, though.

For Mars suits, the goal is generally a 50lb suit because of the .38G and the need to be suited for extensive periods. Generally this assumes longer EVAs than lunar exploration. The Mark III below can be lowered to 38KG (84lb), so it's almost at the mark, but that is probably about the lower limit of balloon suits. The Mark III is the first spacesuit that a wearer was able to do somersaults in. BioSuit is closer to SCUBA gear in mass.

All of this aside,a lot of development is required before we're ready for any kind of surface EVA.

Biosuit:
http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html

http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/spasuits.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/nasrkiii.htm

...will speak at Harvard University's commencement ceremony in June and, like all commencement speakers, will receive an honorary degree from the institution... Not quite. There is still one place where you have to earn your degree.

Actually, I had a different experience of the whole "Doctor as a woman" thing. I'd never heard of Curse of Fatal Death before (sorry, not a die-hard Dr. Who fan), but when I was an undergrad, MITSFS ran a marathon for incoming freshmen which included some amusing fan-produced "episodes" of various shows. There was an entire tape full of episodes featuring a female Doctor, though I don't remember who played the role. It was fun, though, with production values that approached those of the real show. I guess this is something that gets passed around at science fiction conventions. I know, hardly canon, but then CoFD doesn't sound like it's considered canon either.

According to this article, it looks as though Russell T. Davies is considering Sigourney Weaver for such a role, though I can't imagine having a Yank on the show would go over well with UK audiences.

Prof. von Hippel wrote a couple other books. Both of which are available for "free as in beer" downloads under a CC Attribution-no Commercial-no Derivs licence. "Sources of Innovation" and "Democratizing Innovation" are both really good reads. You can download PDFs at von Hippel's site at http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm.

MIT already has an Open Source project dealing with content -- OpenCourseWare. Perhaps their dispute with the SAE will inspire someone at MIT to go forward with an open-source peer-reviewed journal project, making use of LaTeX and other technology mentioned in previous posts. Sort of a spin on "Put up or shut up."

Until 2006 they used LISP/Scheme, but their is change for Fall 2007. Its unclear to me what the change is. My MIT first computer course was LISP in the 1970s, so its been a long haul.

IMHO, it's certainly not nearly important as them offering OpenCourseWare to the masses for free.

Direct link to pdf

Sure, with the growth of computer tech and early dna sequencing nanotech, we are getting to the point where it will cost a couple of hundred bucks and take a day or so to sequence youor own geneome and find ou all the nasty things hiding there. But wait!!, the same advances will give us the ability to develop nanobots that can get inside our cells and manipulate the dna/rna and protien structures, essentially giving us the eventual ability to fix anything wrong in the cell, clean up the "gunk" that aging generates, replace old worn out dna, mitochondria etc, basiclly reverse and eliminate aging. (check out www.mprize.org www.sens.org www.longevitymeme.org http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1 http://www.imminst.org/ also: MIT biobricks http://parts.mit.edu/registry/index.php/Main_Page

What we need is the ability to stop waging usless wars and reduce the worldwide spending of 1000 billion on war materials and take 100 million to 1 billion dollars and put it into the mprize to reverse aging in mice models and then human models (we need to finance what scientists are calling for is an mahatten sized project to cure aging and eliminate cancers, diseases by getting down to the dna level and letting loose the engineers to revers engineer the human animal and fix this thing called aging. We are now getting the tools to manipulate matter at the atomic lelvel (cpu chips are a good example), we now need to open up the dna universe to hacking (see also: MIT biobricks, its like making CAD logic designs (ttl/cmos) functions at atomic dna levels!)

You will find that there is an interesting correlation every year between the Research Science Institute participants and the Intel STS winners. RSI is a program that is run in cooperation with MIT where high school students spend their summer before senior year doing research with MIT professors. Intel has even noticed the connection and they have a page on it. Out of the list of top ten Intel STS winners, the following were at RSI in 2006:

Mary Masterman (1)
Dmitry Vaintrob (3)
Megan Blewett (7)

Pretty good for a program that only accepts 50 American students (IIRC). The usual suspects used to show up as Lucent Global Science Scholars as well, but that program was unfortunately ended in 2005.

In my experience, the key to high school and undergraduate research is a teacher/professor that pushes the student far beyond what he or she knows. A high school student just doesn't have enough experience to come up with truly groundbreaking research. However, amazing things can happen when the teacher/professor exposes the student to advanced concepts which their minds need to struggle to understand. The student will often approach the problem in a different way then the researchers in the field, which will sometimes lead to a new and unexpected result.

The main difficulty is that it can be really frustrating and demoralizing for a student to be in a place where they have to struggle to understand a concept. I think a lot of high schoolers and undergrads get discouraged when they have difficulty understanding a concept. Educators just need to keep that in mind and reassure students that the learning process is an important component of doing good research.

I've got Google maps on my phone - does not replace the GPS but useful in emergency. Perhaps the real interest here is the growing development of applications based around the modern cellphone's unique features: 1. Nearly everyone has at least one, (increasingly in 'third world' countries too), and carries it all the time. 2. It's increasingly a computer, (mail, calendar..) and media-player as well as a communications device. 3. It can be located, (but this is illegal in most countries). Today, people are watching TV on their phones and using them as payment devices. Organisations are buying tracking information from the phone companies (individual's information supposedly not available), in order to better understand ppultion concentration and movement. See here http://reality.media.mit.edu/ for example. Why would Google NOT be interested in getting into this stuff?

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (full text online). Anyone who hires someone who doesn't know what's in this book is hiring people for the wrong reasons. Unless you want to work for such people, it doesn't make sense to go into the workforce with such a narrow knowledge (C/C++/C#). Learn everything you can about everything.

In the traditional Landau paradigm, phases of matter arise as broken symmetries of the Hamiltonian, with different phases corresponding to different symmetries and described by a "local order parameter" (e.g. magnetization).

With the advent of developments in high-temperature superconductivity and the quantum Hall effect, new phases were found that exist completely outside the Landau paradigm: topological order, in which there is no local symmetry, yet the topology of the system can globally distinguish one phase from another.

Excitations of these systems with topological order were once thought to be necessarily "gapped", that is, the quasiparticle excitations have an effective mass. However, Wen has proposed a more general notion of "quantum order", in which gapless (massless) quasiparticles, analogous to photons or other gauge vector bosons, can appear.

The mechanism by which this occurs, in Wen's paradigm, is through "string net condensation". In quantum field theory, from the work of Polyakov and others, it is possible to think of the field lines connecting particles as "strings", with the particles residing at the endpoints of the strings. The fields are gauge fields, so the "stringy" field lines correspond to the massless gauge bosons, as opposed to the massive matter particles that serve as the string endpoints. Wen's quantum order has excitations in a spin lattice correspond effectively to strings (massless "force field" quasiparticles), which are open, i.e., have endpoints (massive "matter" quasiparticles).

There are actually strong analogies between these ideas and actual string theory (as noted by my reference to Polyakov's work). In fact, Wen did his Ph.D. in string theory under Edward Witten before switching to condensed matter.

The work discussed in this story is an experimental demonstration of a system with gapless excitations that do not obey Landau's local order paradigm, and thus relate to Wen's work on quantum order. (I am fuzzy on the details so I don't know to what extent this work is a confirmation of Wen's theories. I also don't know how novel gapless excitations are without symmetry breaking.)

You can read more about this from his work, such as this. Wen has even proposed that perhaps the actual photons and electrons we think are real are really just quasiparticle excitations arising from a low energy (large scale) effective field theory of some underlying submicroscopic lattice that we can't see — see here: he can recover many (but not all) of the aspects of the particle physics this way, and argues that it unifies light and matter (since open strings always have endpoints). I think he has problems with chiral fermions, IIRC. The big stumbling block is of course gravity, although he has made efforts in that direction too (here). He has written a graduate textbook on these ideas; he also has some talks up on his web page.

In the traditional Landau paradigm, phases of matter arise as broken symmetries of the Hamiltonian, with different phases corresponding to different symmetries and described by a "local order parameter" (e.g. magnetization).

With the advent of developments in high-temperature superconductivity and the quantum Hall effect, new phases were found that exist completely outside the Landau paradigm: topological order, in which there is no local symmetry, yet the topology of the system can globally distinguish one phase from another.

Excitations of these systems with topological order were once thought to be necessarily "gapped", that is, the quasiparticle excitations have an effective mass. However, Wen has proposed a more general notion of "quantum order", in which gapless (massless) quasiparticles, analogous to photons or other gauge vector bosons, can appear.

The mechanism by which this occurs, in Wen's paradigm, is through "string net condensation". In quantum field theory, from the work of Polyakov and others, it is possible to think of the field lines connecting particles as "strings", with the particles residing at the endpoints of the strings. The fields are gauge fields, so the "stringy" field lines correspond to the massless gauge bosons, as opposed to the massive matter particles that serve as the string endpoints. Wen's quantum order has excitations in a spin lattice correspond effectively to strings (massless "force field" quasiparticles), which are open, i.e., have endpoints (massive "matter" quasiparticles).

There are actually strong analogies between these ideas and actual string theory (as noted by my reference to Polyakov's work). In fact, Wen did his Ph.D. in string theory under Edward Witten before switching to condensed matter.

The work discussed in this story is an experimental demonstration of a system with gapless excitations that do not obey Landau's local order paradigm, and thus relate to Wen's work on quantum order. (I am fuzzy on the details so I don't know to what extent this work is a confirmation of Wen's theories. I also don't know how novel gapless excitations are without symmetry breaking.)

You can read more about this from his work, such as this. Wen has even proposed that perhaps the actual photons and electrons we think are real are really just quasiparticle excitations arising from a low energy (large scale) effective field theory of some underlying submicroscopic lattice that we can't see — see here: he can recover many (but not all) of the aspects of the particle physics this way, and argues that it unifies light and matter (since open strings always have endpoints). I think he has problems with chiral fermions, IIRC. The big stumbling block is of course gravity, although he has made efforts in that direction too (here). He has written a graduate textbook on these ideas; he also has some talks up on his web page.

You mean the Channel 4 programme - I hesitate to say 'documentary' as it made Michael Moore look professional and honest - which has since been denounced by one of the scientists the makers tricked into appearing?

Modern photonics, if it works within a computer, will make it impossible to eavesdrop on a computer with a van-eck style of a attack. Granted, van eck phreaking a VGA cable may be doable (barely), and performing similar snoops on a motherboard may seem incredibly difficult even by today's standards, it is within the realm of possibility. Take a look at the field of acoustic cryptanalysis and its potential.

Now extend that into the electromagnetic spectrum, give yourself a very powerful broadband software defined radio and a good isolated faraday cage, and could it be possible to mount a similar attack electronically?

If photonics take over, we will for once be in a safe-zone of knowing once and for all that no overly powerful overseeing entity will be able to eavesdrop on any kind of electromagnetic emissions, so long as you don't have any light leaks.

Hilf is the "dirty little secret" man?

All you have to do is examine that video critically. False premises. Characterization. Posturing. Strawmen. False dichotomies. Flattery. It goes on and on and on.

It's a "dirty little secret", according to him, that a lot of F/OSS runs on more Window machines than Linux machines.

It's a "dirty little secret", according to him, that a lot of F/OSS projects are abandoned playthings.

It's a "dirty little secret", according to him, that the testing effort that goes into those abandoned playthings doesn't match what goes into Microsoft Windows.

On, and on, and on.

Think about those assertions. Strip the characterization. Consider the assertions. Now look at the characterization again.

Anyone who objects to the /. estimation of Microsoft's character should examine that video critically. Before watching it, maybe spend some time with "On Sophistical Refutations". I can't make myself watch it again. I can feel my revulsion, physically.

This isn't really new... anyone that has read Sterlings' "Hacker Crackdown (http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html) will know about FCIC and FLETC and their role in giving some structure to the 80's/early 90's law enforcement personnel (mostly Secret Service). Actually, I'll go slightly offtopic - and only slightly, since the chapter "Law and Order" goes directly to the topic at hand - and recommend taking an hour to read the mentioned book, *tremendous* insight on the relation between law, technology and civil liberties. It's a detailed account about "Operation Sundevil", which most people know about as the taking down of LoD and Phrack, and the creation of the EFF. I remember the turmoil in the scene back then, and the book does a marvelous job on describing the hacker culture of the 80's.