Slashdot Mirror

Why do we all need to vote on the same day?
Why do we need to congregate at designated areas?
I can do my banking securely online, why not vote?
Why not have online voting?

Because the day we have online voting is the day I come to your house, put a gun to your head and demand you vote for George W Bush. At least at the polling place, there are poll workers to ensure that no guns make it in, and no reliable reciept makes it out.

Have a look at Three Ballot Voting. Now, there are several critiques of Three Ballot voting out (I just found them, so I haven't read them) which may turn to point out that three ballot voting isn't a good idea, but the main point is that the paper is simple enough that someone can read it and understand the principles at play in an election.

Check this: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33 227017.pdf

The paper appears to shoot down any chance of an IEC fusion reactor producing useful energy outputs. This paper has been around for a while and is one reason why so few people are interested in IEC (or similar systems) these days. I'm not qualified to follow the scientific argument, but I'd love to know whether Dr. Bussard can answer it.

gravity is conserved - for every quantity of gravity that is exerted by matter, an equal quantity of antigravity is left behind in the "ether".

The antigravity drives the expansion of the universe, and the gravity drives the accretion of matter into stars and planets.

You need to read

The Inflationary Universe by Alan Guth.

Your "out of the box" thinking has been formalized already! :-)

That's a good point. There's a lot of debate about this right now. Some people want more power and permission to from the FCC to use different parts of the spectrum to increase the range. Others are concerned about interference. The problem with wireless communications is that in physics there's a measurement called "skin depth" which is the distance a wave travels before it's power level drops by 1/e or about 1/3. The formula is something like (wavelength/2*pi).

As for the cost:

Probably the most practical outside APs right now are ones with soekris boards. These are what sflan uses. Not cheap like you say, but there's no reason a $20 board shouldn't work. Couple that with something like MIT's roofnet meshed network, boost the power just a bit, and you've got a pretty good system.

Props to Cornell for their impressive work! (and yeah, that chair is just amazing to watch. If only IKEA would license that technology... but I digress.)

I'd like to point out a similar bit of work from about 12 years ago. Different approach, but similar goals: Cynthia Breazeal (Ferrell) (hope I'm spelling that right) did some incredibly impressive work as a Grad student @ MIT in the 90s. The most germain is her paper titled Failure Recognition and Fault Tolerance of an Autonomous Robot

This is a MUST READ paper for anyone interested in building robots which operating in real-time in the unpredictable real world. (Real World. Noun. The place where $#it happens, stuff breaks, sensors get noisy input, etc. and the robot has to "cope" anyway.)

In this paper she describes a methodology for developing a six-legged, insect-like robot, Hannibal [pictures and links], which can adapt to both minor and gross subsystem failures and continue, as much as practical, to fulfill its mission. IMO, the best part is the section talking about adaptive gaits where the robot can change seamlessly from high-speed to high-stability walking patterns, as required, and should one (or more) of the legs becomes inoperable, the robot learns to make due without it prior programming thanks to the subsumption architecture Rod Brooks invented and she and other notable members of the Mobile Robot Labs perfected.

Her work these days is mostly centered around human-computer/robot interactions exploring emotive systems and feedback to bridge the gap.

Yeah, I'm a fanboy.

Props to Cornell for their impressive work! (and yeah, that chair is just amazing to watch. If only IKEA would license that technology... but I digress.)

I'd like to point out a similar bit of work from about 12 years ago. Different approach, but similar goals: Cynthia Breazeal (Ferrell) (hope I'm spelling that right) did some incredibly impressive work as a Grad student @ MIT in the 90s. The most germain is her paper titled Failure Recognition and Fault Tolerance of an Autonomous Robot

This is a MUST READ paper for anyone interested in building robots which operating in real-time in the unpredictable real world. (Real World. Noun. The place where $#it happens, stuff breaks, sensors get noisy input, etc. and the robot has to "cope" anyway.)

In this paper she describes a methodology for developing a six-legged, insect-like robot, Hannibal [pictures and links], which can adapt to both minor and gross subsystem failures and continue, as much as practical, to fulfill its mission. IMO, the best part is the section talking about adaptive gaits where the robot can change seamlessly from high-speed to high-stability walking patterns, as required, and should one (or more) of the legs becomes inoperable, the robot learns to make due without it prior programming thanks to the subsumption architecture Rod Brooks invented and she and other notable members of the Mobile Robot Labs perfected.

Her work these days is mostly centered around human-computer/robot interactions exploring emotive systems and feedback to bridge the gap.

Yeah, I'm a fanboy.

I don't know about that suggestion - that is an excellent book, if you're taking a course and it's the textbook. If you're not taking a course, you're probably not going to get much out of it, because there's no way to find out what the answers to any of the exercises are (and considering the number of "the proof of this is given in exercise 12.1-3" or, "see exercise 34.1-5 for the solution to this problem" cookies in this text, you're missing a lot if you happen to be stuck on a given exercise). Infuriatingly, although the author(s) publish a solutions guide for professors only (in case the professor is teaching a course he doesn't understand, I presume), they're openly hostile to students who might want to double-check their own answers against an authoritative source (or maybe they themselves can't solve all of the problems...)?

BTW, I'd highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated (or anything else by Richard Stevens), Advanced Unix Programming, and Applied Cryptography.

Check.this.shit
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

6.4MHz fits nicely into this, yielding a Q of 2.5.

I have a CS undergrad too. I had the same concerns about areas of weakness in the education I received.

I highly recommend the MIT Open Courseware and the Webcasts at Berkley.

Each provides a quite different approach to CS education. Just remember that you did not learn everything you will ever need to know in college. Hopefully your undergrad taught you how to learn new information quickly.

QUERTY was designed in part to slow typists down.

Good that we are not in Singapore but in any case, it is time to replace the current provider based structure of the internet with its congested and vulnerable backbones with a more flexible one: wireless community mesh networks. There are already many such projects e.g. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php

http://space.mit.edu/ASC/analysis/IIPeg/IIPeg.html

Well done!

In one stroke, you not only showed up the OP, you also proved wrong those who said it couldn't be done. Bravo!

(Incidentally, that approach wouldn't have occurred to me, despite years of C wrangling. :)

As a someone with some graduate education in oceanography, I have a pretty direct interest in this, and I think you've hit on something very important. When Mann's paper came out, I was still skeptical about the anthropogenic nature of warming for several reasons. One was that I felt the uncertainties on many estimations were still rather large. For example, the lack of understanding on whether the ocean is presently a net source or net sink of carbon was a pretty big hole in the carbon budget. I don't think that one has been thoroughly resolved, but there's been progress.

Mann's original "hockey stick" paper is another such example. The criticism and counter-criticism of Mann's paper is a great example of good science in action. Van Storch and the other Canadian guys (McKitrick and McIntyre, one a geophysicist with an oil exploration company, and the other an economist) raised reasonable criticism about the type of noise fed in, and how the medieval warm period was treated. Others (e.g. http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_Co mment.pdf), including Mann wrote counter-criticism, Von Storch et all wrote counter-coutner-criticisms, etc., and notwithstanding the cute quote in this Monckton guy's PDF about "CENSORED_DATA", Mann's finding still looks to be an important one. Now models are models and not measured events, but the use of those findings was a pretty big step in modeling future climate change based on paleological proxy data. There are only a few credible scientists among this climate-change denier lot, and they themselves are pretty old guard (e.g. Richard Lindzen, William Gray).

For myself, the process around Mann's result did a lot to convince me that in fact the was certainty that humans are an important driver of the observed warming.

In larger concentrations, indoles smell like feces. In fact, feces usually smell like feces because they contain indoles- 3-methylindole, for instance, also goes by the name skatole, as in "scat," for good reason. Indoles are produced in the breakdown of many natural products in the body, most notably the amino acid tryptophan and its derivatives like serotonin (coincidentally, while E. coli has a well-studied system called the trp operon for making tryptophan, we lack this, so tryptophan must be obtained from the diet). So step one in making something smell good is getting rid of processes that smell bad.

As far as the production of nice smells like wintergreen and banana, those two smells might stand out to anyone who had an organic chemistry lab course- Fischer esterification being a very popular experiment for novices. The nice smelling chemicals, methyl salicylate and isoamyl acetate (more of a pear smell, IMO) are esters, combinations of an organic acid and an alcohol (acetyl salicyate is aspirin, btw). Organic chemists use a reaction catalyzed by acid or base and heat; biology uses enzymes called transferases to do the same job. The genetic engineering that the MIT team did is here- the salicylate methyltransferase comes from a petunia hybrid, for instance, and the alcohol acetyltransferase from Saccharomyces cervesiae, a.k.a. brewer's yeast (there are some good beers out there that have a fruit odor to them, despite containing no fruit- this is how). They also had to insert a bunch of genes to allow E. coli to make precursors it would have been unable to otherwise, like salicylic acid, and others to regulate the process. The MIT team has a page covering the major elements of their "toolbox" here.

http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~rivest/Rivest-TheThre eBallotVotingSystem.pdf

Rivest, the R of RSA, came out with this a couple months ago. I think he covered pretty much all the attacks on an election. I need to think about this punchscan thing some more, but it feels like it's missing something.

Your points 1&2 may seem to be mutually exclusive, but they are not. In addition to the method described in the actual article (which I'm guessing you didn't read), here's another system that succeeds in providing verification without allowing a voter to prove who they voted for: http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/Rivest-TheThreeB allotVotingSystem.pdf

Please, read it before you comment further. While it's possible to have verification and vote secrecy, the cost of getting both of these features is an increase in complexity.

Carbon Dioxide + Water + Light energy Glucose + Oxygen + Water

Isn't there a way we can do this on a massive scale and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? And I don't mean plant forests because that isn't likely to happen due to the space they require. Synthesize our own chlorophyll and do it much more efficiently than plants can? Or perhaps skip chlorophyll altogether and go with some other means of using light (or even use nuclear power if some other energy source would be more efficient) to implement the carbon reduction reaction in an even simpler way than chlorophyll does it which can allow us to sequester the carbon.

Or perhaps it would be simpler to find some way to store carbon dioxide. But because it is a gas that sounds troublesome.

Looks like the guys at MIT and various people in industry are looking into the problem: http://sequestration.mit.edu/

Ultimately humanity is going to have to take active control over the climate of our planet. Nothing can be left to nature anymore because as part of nature we would destroy ourselves.

This "new" voting system sounds remarkably similar to a system proposed by Ronald Rivest (of RSA fame).

The problem with either system is it requres you to trust a computer.

In the case of Rivest's work, you must trust a computer to do certain logical computations. (Engineers and professors can do them in their head, but 90+% of the public in a given country do not have that skill.)
In the case of Chaum's system, which I believe to be an inferior version of Rivest's work, you must trust that the A and B the computer showed you are the same A and B actually used to tally your vote. It deals with the case of a false scan, but it DOES NOTHING TO SOLVE THE CASE OF DELIBERATE MANIPULATION.

Both systems add practically unverifyable processes to a system that previously didn't have them. (Assuming you were using paper ballots.) As an electrical engineer, believe me that PAPER is the way to go.

I'm trying to solve that very problem as my PhD. My solution would involve using "semantic web" formats (which are kind of superior forms of XML, or restricted forms of logic) to represent data, and tags (a la del.icio.us) allowing users to build meaningful data collections without programming a backend.

The yet unsolved part is how to give users the power to automate common tasks. I plan to use end-user programming techniques for this.

You've expressed the problem in a very concise way. There are already systems trying to bring the Unix philosophy to the User environment, like Archy and the Haystack project, which use different but related approaches.

• At a very low level, how a computer works. What goes on inside the CPU, what a "bus" is, what memory paging is. Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum, Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson.
• Programming Languages, should know enough about computers to be able to write a simple program in assembly, and then learn a couple "simple" high level languages e.g. Perl, Python, Ruby, followed by C, then Java (or C++), and then a not so common language (aka "languages that make you think") like Haskell, ML, Lisp, or Scheme. Plus a basic/general history of programming languages. Suggested reading: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Software engineering. From making sure programs work, correctly, to programming in the large (not everything can be written as a 1000 line Perl script), and software development as a profession (ethics, legalities, future). Two good references are Code Complete by Steven McConnell, and The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
• Basic electronics. Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims or Lessons In Electric Circuits - Just the basics, Ohms Law and some basic ideas such as logic gates and flip flops.
  
• Enough math to be dangerous

Spelled "pact" wrong above.

Here's data backing up my claims in case you try and make another trolling, uninformed, jackassed comment.

http://taiwansecurity.org/News/IHT-The-Balance-of- Power-Remains-in-Taiwan's-Favor.htm

"On July 19, the Pentagon released its annual report to the U.S. Congress on "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China," which it was required to do according to the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2000...The report is clear that, until the end of the present decade, Beijing will not be able to defeat militarily even "a moderate-size adversary" and will not be able to project its sea power beyond coastal defense."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_T aiwan#Balance_of_power

"President Clinton, sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region, sailing them into the Taiwan Strait. The PRC, unable to track the ships' movements, and probably unwilling to escalate the conflict, quickly backed down..."

http://web.mit.edu/ssp/seminars/wed_archives_04spr ing/ross.htm

"...China today relies on missiles and fighter aircraft to threaten Taiwan. These weapons don't provide China a capability to bring Taiwan to its knees..."

http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?pare ntid=6671

http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&repo rt_id=333&language_id=1

i am basically for stronger enforcement of copyright laws.. does this make me 'anti-tech' or 'pro-tech' in this survey view?

anti-tech, you douche.

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1763
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=01 97

http://jorge.cortell.net/
http://www.benkler.org/
http://www.dklevine.com/
http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

http://swpat.ffii.org/
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.piratbyran.org/
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/
http://www.cambia.org/
http://www.plos.org/
http://www.fsf.org/

The properties of an ideal election system are contradictory. Voters should be able to verify that their votes are counted correctly, but should be able to have their choices kept completely private--in fact, some would say that voters should not be able to prove they voted a certain way, even if they wanted to. So, can both of these goals realistically be achieved without sacrificing each other?

Turns out, yes. This is possible with a simple paper system: no complicated cryptography, no complicated machines, no complicated rules. It satisfies both of the required properties (privacy and verification) and is in every way more tamper-resistant than current elections. It's called ThreeBallot, and it works like this. ...

Note that electronic "touch-screen" voting systems could also be employed, such that the voter chooses candidates once, and the machine prints a suitable set of paper ballots, without requiring the voter to think about the mechanics of the system.

The project was called "Installation." I did it in the Aesthetics + Computation group at the MIT Media Lab. http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/simong/installatio nNew/cover.html

when you vote you're given a ticket with a number, anyone can go online and see how everyone voted

Well I hope IE7 has some kind of extensions as Firefox/SeaMonkey has. Then it would be possible to build one which loads Java script frameworks (e.g. Dojo toolkit, configurable) in the background before it's needed by a page. Sure I hope Firefox/SeaMonkey is faster in implementing such a feature yet it only makes sense if the vast majority of users have such a feature. IMO this kind of background loading of frameworks is the missing piece for a broad use of AJAX.

Tim Berners-Lee (http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166) is also considering to enhance the web standards yet these changes should be implemented with extensions first so they can be used by experimental sites. IMO it's essential to add database tags to HTML so most current scripting could be eliminated. This would make the web a lot more secure than now.

O. Wyss

I don't understand why an open voting system wouldn't work.

You are as welcome as anyone to propose a system, and suggestions of one which might work would be appreciated. But before you make such a suggestion, please assess whether the system you have in mind considers the following:

• A voting system, as generally envisioned, is resilient against vote selling, wherein a voter exchanges his vote for benefit. A even an open-voting system must be closed enough to prevent a person from being able to prove his own vote was counted for the correct candidate. Note that this is different than being able to know that one's own vote was counted for the correct candidate.
• There is also a difference between having a voter-verified paper trail and actually counting based on it. If the physical ballots are never counted, it doesn't matter whether the electronic count matches. And if one can predict or control which paper ballots will never be counted, the fact they exist matters little. This is why even having an (electronic) count other than the physical ballots makes those ballots practically useless.

So while I'd love to criticize your suggestion for a better voting system, I fear you haven't defined it well enough for me to criticise yet.

If you feel motivated, read through Ron Rivest's (the "R" of the RSA "public key cryptography" team) ThreeVote system, paying special attention to the kinds of threats he admits it would be vulnerable to. He has eliminated problems like making sure the machine is running a trustable binary and is instead worried that someone might be able to rig a dozen or so votes statistically by buying several thousand.

One interesting scheme that allows a form of verification without allowing vote selling is Ronald Rivest's ThreeBallot Voting System.

Obligatory (PDF).

``Couldn't most of the issues involved in e-voting be solved by producing the voter with a paper 'receipt' as proof of their vote (as well as a corresponding receipt for their precinct)?''

Yes, actually. Probably the simplest way would be to have the machine print out the vote, which is then dumped in a ballot box. But then, why use a machine at all?

The next step up would be to have the same scheme, but with the machine actually tallying the votes, as well. You get instant election results, and you can verify the results by counting the generated printouts if you suspect something may be amiss or as a matter of standard procedure.

Receipts that voters take home are something to be very careful about. In particular, it must _not_ be possible to use the receipt to prove who you voted for. If that were possible, it would be possible to coerce or bribe voters and verify that they did what you wanted them to do.

For a system that gives you, as a voter, a way to verify that your vote was listed, without giving you a receipt that proves who you voted for, see Secret-Ballot Receipts: True Voter-Veriable Elections (PDF) and The ThreeBallot Voting System.

``Couldn't most of the issues involved in e-voting be solved by producing the voter with a paper 'receipt' as proof of their vote (as well as a corresponding receipt for their precinct)?''

Yes, actually. Probably the simplest way would be to have the machine print out the vote, which is then dumped in a ballot box. But then, why use a machine at all?

The next step up would be to have the same scheme, but with the machine actually tallying the votes, as well. You get instant election results, and you can verify the results by counting the generated printouts if you suspect something may be amiss or as a matter of standard procedure.

Receipts that voters take home are something to be very careful about. In particular, it must _not_ be possible to use the receipt to prove who you voted for. If that were possible, it would be possible to coerce or bribe voters and verify that they did what you wanted them to do.

For a system that gives you, as a voter, a way to verify that your vote was listed, without giving you a receipt that proves who you voted for, see Secret-Ballot Receipts: True Voter-Veriable Elections (PDF) and The ThreeBallot Voting System.

Screwing telemarketers for fun and profit

• WMBR
• WERS (for more Willie Nelson)

If you want another example, read this: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/sp ring02-papers/caps.htmf

the link should actually be http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/sp ring02-papers/caps.htm

If you want another example, read this: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/sp ring02-papers/caps.htmf

the link should actually be http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/sp ring02-papers/caps.htm

You didn't see the spectacular failure of security in airports that preceded the Sept. 11th attacks by mere hours? Haven't you noticed the fact that the so-called security measures enacted since then are unlikely to prevent an identical attack? Or are you saying that because a successful attack hasn't been carried out recently, we are therefore secure? That's a very dangerous stance. It assumes that because vulnerabilities haven't been exploited, they aren't a problem. That's like saying that because some critical vulnerability in your operating system of choice hasn't been exploited yet, the vendor might as well not issue a fix; we should only fix a problem once half the boxes on the 'net have been infected with the as-yet-unwritten virus that exploits the problem. Soghoian pointed out a problem that has been known for months and yet hasn't been repaired. He did this to draw attention to the security theater that exists surrounding airline travel; he was trying to highlight the fact that our government doesn't take security seriously, but only tries to foster the appearance of safety while failing to address real issues.

If you want another example, read this: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/sp ring02-papers/caps.htmf

For a wealth of information about problems with our airport and airline security, start reading archives of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html

If published before 1923. . .

Like Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.

And in any case, he doesn't actually want scans, even if he doesn't know that. What he wants is music that has been digitally encoded in a free and open standard, so that there are readers the can interepret and print it.

The basically means ABC and Lilypond files:

http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/ABC-FAQ.html

http://lilypond.org/web/

KFG

Hehe.

I could probably go on-and-on,
Read the rest of this comment...

Anyway.

Block what's not rated. It's also important that your filter have a mechanism to request that a site be unblocked

My HS started doing this a few months before I graduated. I was surprised it worked as well as it did - I would've thought it would be blocking a lot of sites because of the whitelist. Anyway, yes, a human verifier who responds quickly (~1 day) is pretty much a necessity with this scheme, but if you use a commercial filtering system they already have a very large database.

There were two problems with the filter. I won't name the filter here because I don't want students to try this and cause problems.

1) Even though it had whitelists on domains and IPs, it did not check the whitelist for one-word domains. A lot of sites really don't care about the host header, or have a sensible default virtual host. That means you can go into /etc/hosts (or its Windows equivalent) and add, e.g., "foo 18.242.0.29" and http://foo/ will work even if http://geminorum.mit.edu/ is blocked.

2) The filter had a really stupid bug (as far as I can tell - I'll probably test this more over Christmas break) that if you didn't send the first significant part of the HTTP header in one packet, it wouldn't detect that it was HTTP traffic and would not invoke the filter. Therefore the packets ["G"] ["ET http://www.porn.com/ HTTP/1.1\n..."] worked perfectly fine. I noticed this with telnet, but it would not be difficult to write a proxy to allow your browser to do the same.

And even in fields where there is rapid progress, not everything is instantly outdated. Here is an intro computer science textbook whose most recent edition is a decade old (and has only been updated once in about 20 years), and is still widely used and respected. And available for free online, so it doesn't really need to be covered by this project, but you get the point.

Of course, you need a decent K-12 education first to make any use of this, but it's a start.

Of course, you need a decent K-12 education first to make any use of this, but it's a start.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

$100 million to create a fund that generates a $10 million annual budget, with additional donors actively sought - either a blank check, or targeted at a certain subject or language. That kind of money sounds like alot but it isn't enough to buy a single Hollywood movie. It has to be used efficiently and leveraged.

So first, expand the budget. The French will pay for French, China can pay for Chinese. Translations can be made into African languages. Physics, biology, chemistry and computer science can have multiple corporate sponsors, too. So a department that does this full time for pay needs to exist.

Next, what to spend the money on, besides administration, research, and tool building. The answer is not something that can be solved instantaneously. Probably a mix of things would be a good idea to start with.

Perhaps a good thing would be to make a plan with goals to work towards. The original post talks about buying and freeing works, which caused a bunch of posts covering entertainment, primary school and college education, ancient and classical literature libraries, preservation of techniques, and recovery from a disaster. Since the project will likely gain more momentum (blogs, news articles, contributions, additional sponsors) the more people use it, one goal should be to assemble useful and interesting works, not only for the third world (which is a great goal in itself of course) but also things found interesting by educated first worlders who are active on the net. So I would add contemporary fiction too.

Education is something to which people donate a lot of money. In fact I have often heard Harvard has 100 times the endowment of Tokyo University and this makes a massive difference. Get some people who know what they are talking about and find out how to make it possible for people to donate to this thing instead of to a University, and get a tax break.

Next look at what other people have done and what works. Consider working with other projects for a synergy that makes the investments in both our project and theirs more valuable. So for education, take a look at something like MIT OpenCourseware. They have lecture notes and sometimes videos of lectures, assignments, exams, reading lists or tools. They don't grant credits, and I haven't seen any books - not for brain science, electronic circuits, linear algebra, or Intro to linguistics at least.

Also did you know the U.S. Military has a huge series of books for general education? I have seen a list for example of books covering a number of courses in electronics.

So here are some suggestions I have as far as content goes. I'll mention what I might like to see, which is better I think

Contemporary fiction, and science fiction. Out of copyright is okay, though I would like to see at least one book, Robert Heinlein's Friday. Because it talks about a terminal that has access to all the libraries of the world. I would also recommend buying some popular books as a way to get people to come to the site. Maybe a few books a month. Ebook readers will get more popular too. Talk to Tor Books about masters of golden era of science fiction.

Hire book writers. 100 people at $10,000 each is only 1/10 of the budget. Institute a quality control process that compares them to the top books used by universities and aim to beat them. And hire smart people (tm) to write on a certain subject. Not just a rehash.

Survey the books used by top schools and study them, contact authors, and discover what it takes to have a really good author write a really good book. Assign some budget and try to cover various fields, creating a chain from beginner to advanced material so people can actually learn something they don't know. This is important for all age groups and nationalities.

Start a project to try and standardize things so they don't have to be reinvented by each author, and so that materials for different fields, or at least within the chain of a single field, can be linked

"Free "books" and lectures would allow anyone anywhere, that just have access to the internet, to learn whatever he/she want." OCW may be what you are looking for. Although I must admit that it is quite technical.

Sorry, no. Thank you for playing.

Those just happen to be the incidents that someone got photographs of,
there have been many more, including Tetris.

It is animated and scrolls text or any 6x6 animation; see the video on the link.

oh god. mirror: http://web.mit.edu/dheera/www/simdisplay.php.html

There's an effort at MIT to develop Mechanically Active Materials.

"Team 2 is developing nanomaterials that are capable of mechanical actuation and dynamic stiffness. As part of the soldier's battlesuit, these adaptive multifunctional materials will improve soldier survivability.

Mechanical actuators embedded as part of a soldier's uniform will allow a transformation from a flexible and compliant material to a non-compliant material that becomes armor, thus protecting the soldier by distributing impact. Soft switchable clothing can also be transformed into a reconfigurable cast that stabilizes an injury such as a broken leg. Contracting materials can be made to apply direct pressure to a wound, function as a tourniquet, or even perform CPR when needed. Mechanical actuators can also be used as exo-muscles for augmentation of a soldier's physical strength or agility and as wound compresses."

There are some polymer gels that change shape when an electric field is applied. And shape-memory alloys, which have been a solution looking for a problem for decades, have already been used for a dress with a changing hemline.

All those little motors and strings are a theatrical effect; that approach is too fragile and bulky.