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I ran across that site today while in the SIPB room, actually...it seems to be last year's webpage (which is still probably enough for the submitter). SIPB's current page is http://stuff.mit.edu/sipb/.

In particular, scripts is a webserver that allows CGIs in several popular languages and SQL databases, has auto-installers for software like MediaWiki, and depends on quite a few hacks running on SELinux to make the site secure between users (I've heard that even if you get Apache to run arbitrary code you gain nothing).

I ran across that site today while in the SIPB room, actually...it seems to be last year's webpage (which is still probably enough for the submitter). SIPB's current page is http://stuff.mit.edu/sipb/.

In particular, scripts is a webserver that allows CGIs in several popular languages and SQL databases, has auto-installers for software like MediaWiki, and depends on quite a few hacks running on SELinux to make the site secure between users (I've heard that even if you get Apache to run arbitrary code you gain nothing).

On that note, see if AFS is workable. It's not perfect*, but it does have good clients for Windows, Mac, and *nix, the ability to work from anywhere on the Internet, decent speeds on the local network, a fancy ACL system, and some amount of encryption.

*I've had problems recently when putting my laptop to sleep on one subnet, waking it up in another subnet (new IP), and trying to save a file that's already open.... but that's admittedly not a common situation. It works as well as a slightly-laggy local disk otherwise.

WebDAV is also a good option for Windows usage, although it's not as secure or customizable (AFS on Windows works like a mapped network drive).

I'd check out what SIPB (Student Information Processing Board) has done for the MIT community. They've been around almost forever and have done a lot of great of things over the years.

http://www.mit.edu/sipb/sipb.html

I read two of the links, and nowhere did it actually mention telemarketers. It seemed to indicate it was more related to customer contact things where the customer is calling about their service, and getting frustrated with the voicemail maze or the person on the phone with them.

Yeah, as usual the summary was completely misleading. Some jackass felt the need to add his two cents. Why the editors accept submissions like this while rejecting scores of others, I'll never know.

But getting back on topic, my first thought upon reading the article was remembering Cynthia Breazeal's work (who says girl geeks can't be scalding hot?) at MIT on developing robots that can interact with humans on an emotional level, like her Kismet robot. The idea is that providing robots with the ability to perceive and project emotions will improve the interaction between humans and machines. There's a great deal of interest in improving the man-machine interface as computers become a much more important part of our lives.

GMD

Scratch is an excellent programming tool for kids. It's great for kids 7 and older.

Seriously, who the hell cares about digital records or fast counts? I don't care how fast the results come in, I want them to be RIGHT.

When we go to paper ballots, we guarantee that the process is easily understood, auditible, difficult to rig, and that counting is repeatable.

If you liked David Chaum's voting scheme, you might also like Ron Rivest's. It has all the benefits of David Chaum's scheme (coercion resistance, voter verifability), without the crypto mumbo jumbo. There's a link here: http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/Rivest-TheThreeB allotVotingSystem.pdf

Well, at least they haven't caught on fire.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V117/N35/mir.35w.html

Section 102(b) of Title 17 of the U.S. Code provides: "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."

The legislative history of this provision indicates that Congress had computer programs in mind when adopting it and meant for it to limit the scope of copyright protection available for computer programs. During legislative hearings leading up to enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, concerns had been expressed about the need for such a provision so that copyright would not overprotect computer programs.n2 Both the House and Senate Committee reports plainly state:

Some concern has been expressed lest copyright in computer programs should extend protection to the methodology or processes adopted by the programmer, rather than merely to the 'writing' expressing his ideas. Section 102(b) is intended, among other things, to make clear that the expression adopted by the programmer is the copyrightable element in a computer program, and that the actual processes or methods embodied in the program are not within the scope of copyright law.

Now, with proper formatting!

The website for the One Laptop Per Child project is http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

And the Wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

RedHat is developing the OS for it, and the first prototype has been released last may.
First generations of the laptop will actually be more expensive, around $156, the $100 pricetag will be ... off memory, somewhere in 2008.

Speccs:
Core electronics: * CPU: AMD Geode GX2-500@1.0W(datasheet)
* CPU clock speed: 366 Mhz
* Compatibility: X86/X87-compatible
* Chipset: AMD CS5536 South Bridge (datasheet)
* Graphics controller: Integrated with Geode CPU; unified memory architecture
* Embedded controller (for production), ENE KB3700: Image:KB3700-ds-01.pdf
* DRAM memory: 128MB dynamic RAM
* Data rate: Dual - DDR266 - 133 Mhz
* BIOS: 1024KB SPI-interface flash ROM; LinuxBIOS open-source BIOS
* Mass storage: 512MB SLC NAND flash, high speed flash controller
* Drives: No rotating media Display:
* Liquid-crystal display:
7.5" Dual-mode TFT display
* Viewing area: 151.6 mm × 113.4 mm
* Resolution: 1200 (H) × 900 (V) resolution (200 dpi)

(sorry about parent)

The website for the One Laptop Per Child project is http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ And the Wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child RedHat is developing the OS for it, and the first prototype has been released last may. First generations of the laptop will actually be more expensive, around $156, the $100 pricetag will be ... off memory, somewhere in 2008. Speccs: Core electronics: * CPU: AMD Geode GX2-500@1.0W(datasheet) * CPU clock speed: 366 Mhz * Compatibility: X86/X87-compatible * Chipset: AMD CS5536 South Bridge (datasheet) * Graphics controller: Integrated with Geode CPU; unified memory architecture * Embedded controller (for production), ENE KB3700: Image:KB3700-ds-01.pdf * DRAM memory: 128MB dynamic RAM * Data rate: Dual - DDR266 - 133 Mhz * BIOS: 1024KB SPI-interface flash ROM; LinuxBIOS open-source BIOS * Mass storage: 512MB SLC NAND flash, high speed flash controller * Drives: No rotating media Display: * Liquid-crystal display: 7.5" Dual-mode TFT display * Viewing area: 151.6 mm × 113.4 mm * Resolution: 1200 (H) × 900 (V) resolution (200 dpi)

Here is the original press release:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/hemostasis.html
Not much new information here, but it's nice to read things that come "straight from the horse's mouth", so to speak.
 
Of real consequence is the main researcher's lab website:

http://web.mit.edu/lms/www/
It is chock full of interesting research on self-assembling peptides, including what substances they've been trying, and the eternally-asked question, Can I run my laptop off of spinach?(They isolated the chloroplast/photosystem of spinach, and hope to use it for photovoltaic purposes).
 
As far as discussion, most of the application has been suggested in the field of delicate microsurgery. Why not band-aids for the masses? Most likely due to the cost. Aside from the financial barriers in bringing an idea to mass-market, especially in the medical field, imagine trying to keep the candidate liquid substance stable for storage, to be used at a moment's notice; if it self-assembles easily, then it can "gel up" just as easily, too. This is combined with the fact that there are already several fairly effective ways to stop the typical cuts-and-scrapes of a household, from regular band-aids and gauze to liquid bandages (which quickly seals off a wound and prevents bleeding, in about the same amount of time). The real application would be in situations where regular hemostasis measures cannot be used or are undesirable. Again, this goes back to microsurgery. In most surgery, hemostasis is achieved by either tying off the bleeding vessel with suture, cauterizing the end of the vessel with a Bovey (an electrical tool used for cutting and cauterizing) or a laser, or simply clamping the vessel with a hemostat. There are other methods, but those are the most common ones in routine surgery. Clamping the vessel is not practical in confined spaces (the hemostat takes up space), cautery can't be used in all situations, and you can't always tie off the bleeder. The self-assembling gel described would be a boon in those surgical situations, another "arrow in the quiver", so to speak. The aforementioned application in patients with hemophilia is also plausible, if less certain.
 
Sadly, the journal that they are publishing in, Nanomedicine, is fairly brand new and not stocked by my local library yet. There have only been three issues of it so far (June 2006, August 2006, and October 2006) and the latest is not on their website yet. I would really like to read that article in full.

Here is the original press release:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/hemostasis.html
Not much new information here, but it's nice to read things that come "straight from the horse's mouth", so to speak.
 
Of real consequence is the main researcher's lab website:

http://web.mit.edu/lms/www/
It is chock full of interesting research on self-assembling peptides, including what substances they've been trying, and the eternally-asked question, Can I run my laptop off of spinach?(They isolated the chloroplast/photosystem of spinach, and hope to use it for photovoltaic purposes).
 
As far as discussion, most of the application has been suggested in the field of delicate microsurgery. Why not band-aids for the masses? Most likely due to the cost. Aside from the financial barriers in bringing an idea to mass-market, especially in the medical field, imagine trying to keep the candidate liquid substance stable for storage, to be used at a moment's notice; if it self-assembles easily, then it can "gel up" just as easily, too. This is combined with the fact that there are already several fairly effective ways to stop the typical cuts-and-scrapes of a household, from regular band-aids and gauze to liquid bandages (which quickly seals off a wound and prevents bleeding, in about the same amount of time). The real application would be in situations where regular hemostasis measures cannot be used or are undesirable. Again, this goes back to microsurgery. In most surgery, hemostasis is achieved by either tying off the bleeding vessel with suture, cauterizing the end of the vessel with a Bovey (an electrical tool used for cutting and cauterizing) or a laser, or simply clamping the vessel with a hemostat. There are other methods, but those are the most common ones in routine surgery. Clamping the vessel is not practical in confined spaces (the hemostat takes up space), cautery can't be used in all situations, and you can't always tie off the bleeder. The self-assembling gel described would be a boon in those surgical situations, another "arrow in the quiver", so to speak. The aforementioned application in patients with hemophilia is also plausible, if less certain.
 
Sadly, the journal that they are publishing in, Nanomedicine, is fairly brand new and not stocked by my local library yet. There have only been three issues of it so far (June 2006, August 2006, and October 2006) and the latest is not on their website yet. I would really like to read that article in full.

Here is the original press release:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/hemostasis.html
Not much new information here, but it's nice to read things that come "straight from the horse's mouth", so to speak.
 
Of real consequence is the main researcher's lab website:

http://web.mit.edu/lms/www/
It is chock full of interesting research on self-assembling peptides, including what substances they've been trying, and the eternally-asked question, Can I run my laptop off of spinach?(They isolated the chloroplast/photosystem of spinach, and hope to use it for photovoltaic purposes).
 
As far as discussion, most of the application has been suggested in the field of delicate microsurgery. Why not band-aids for the masses? Most likely due to the cost. Aside from the financial barriers in bringing an idea to mass-market, especially in the medical field, imagine trying to keep the candidate liquid substance stable for storage, to be used at a moment's notice; if it self-assembles easily, then it can "gel up" just as easily, too. This is combined with the fact that there are already several fairly effective ways to stop the typical cuts-and-scrapes of a household, from regular band-aids and gauze to liquid bandages (which quickly seals off a wound and prevents bleeding, in about the same amount of time). The real application would be in situations where regular hemostasis measures cannot be used or are undesirable. Again, this goes back to microsurgery. In most surgery, hemostasis is achieved by either tying off the bleeding vessel with suture, cauterizing the end of the vessel with a Bovey (an electrical tool used for cutting and cauterizing) or a laser, or simply clamping the vessel with a hemostat. There are other methods, but those are the most common ones in routine surgery. Clamping the vessel is not practical in confined spaces (the hemostat takes up space), cautery can't be used in all situations, and you can't always tie off the bleeder. The self-assembling gel described would be a boon in those surgical situations, another "arrow in the quiver", so to speak. The aforementioned application in patients with hemophilia is also plausible, if less certain.
 
Sadly, the journal that they are publishing in, Nanomedicine, is fairly brand new and not stocked by my local library yet. There have only been three issues of it so far (June 2006, August 2006, and October 2006) and the latest is not on their website yet. I would really like to read that article in full.

The proteins they use are structurally very similar to natural silk, which is composed of proteins arranged primarily in a beta-sheet conformation. This conformation lines up strands of amino acids in a rough plane and cross-links them, usually with hydrogen bonds, but sometimes with ionic attractions or hydrophobic interactions.

The use of spider silk for clotting wounds has been known since ancient times; coagulation basically requires the onsite formation of a sticky, fibrous protein mess, and spider silk is almost completely sticky, fibrous protein (and unlike many similar foreign substances, doesn't provoke a dangerous immune reaction). This protein gel is basically the same sort of thing, but with the neat added trick that the cross-links are the result of ionic interactions, so that you could have an anhydrous powder of this stuff that you sprinkle onto a wound, and when it contacts electrolyte-rich bodily fluid (their paper on peptide nanofiber nerve scaffold notes it only requires normal physiological concentrations of salt, like those in saline or spinal fluid- from the news article, that's not especially clear), it turns to a fibrous gel.

As far as whether it promotes healing, interestingly enough, clotting itself promotes healing- the clot itself stimulates the cells in charge of repair- really, the sooner a stable clot is formed, the sooner your own cells can start fixing the damage. In the neural scaffold paper, the group also points out that, being composed of just the same amino acids ubiquitous in the body, the scaffold can be safely broken down to amino acids and then metabolized or excreted; I would imagine the same would be possible for the clotting gel when it is no longer needed.

In case you're interested in what the K-Iron broad line is check out http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0212065 and http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/spacetime.html

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
According to it's Jargon File entry it's one of the bibles of the Lisp/Scheme world http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/Wizard-Book .html. It's used in various universities, including MIT, as the textbook in CS courses.

Here, take a look and see what it's all about.

I wish someone would restart PGP Fone.

We already know that the plan was to allow the children to modify as much as possible in Python. However, now Perl will be banished:

We have broken the Perl dependency ... freeing up much more space on the flash for user space. Source

Seems fair enough. All i can add is:
We are the Knights who say..... "Ni"! We are the keepers of the sacred words: Ni, Ping, and Nee-womm!

There are some questions that really affect which direction you should go. Where is the content coming from? Is it all locally produced? Is it produced live-to-tape, or is there a lot of postproduction?

You may be interested in A $300 video server tivo-based hack, which is kinda cool.

Anyway - For in and out, you could consider ASI-based transport. An advantage of using DVB-ASI out from your server is that you can easily transition to digital transmission when the time comes. The physical characteristics are similar to SDI, ie a 270mbs signal, but you're dealing with MPEG2 transport streams. You could have multiple program streams if you want. The idea here is that you can use external encoder/decoder boxes that go between audio/video (analog or SDI) and ASI (compressed domain). All you need to do is splice the files at I-frames and stream them out to the device. Hardware's pretty cheap - have had good experience with the cards from DVEO/Computer Modules. Cheap and stable, and they come with linux drivers. You'll need to write some code to make it all work, though. And external encoders/decoders aren't the cheapest thing, but they should be cheaper than most video servers

There are also ASI/MPEG stream splicers to look at - from companies like Leitch/Harris, Thales, and EVS. But you've noted they're a bit expensive.

SDI-based playout is going to be rather expensive no matter how you go. Offloading this work to an external decoder is pretty cost effective. You can also use IP as a transport instead of ASI, to an external decoder, but ASI is a bit simpler and more reliable.

In college, I wrote an automated air playout system on a mac - had a mysql db for asset management and scheduling. This was synced every so often to the website db. Had a pretty simple set of perl scripts (which included calling applescript from the command line via osascript) that handled playing to air. (used quicktime player, actually, with great success). Created blocks of clips using SMIL, which you should check out. Was able to key bugs/logos/time/temp info, too.

Between scheduled programs we cut to an Apple Keynote presentation, started and stopped by the same scripts [using applescript]. The actual presentation was auto-generated during the programming by another perl script, from another database. (Including events from a central campus events database, updated weather forecast, program schedule db for coming up next/later, advertisements/PSAs [another db with this info], and video interstitials)...

Now that was a fun project. But quite a mess at the same time.

For calculus, you ought to give Berlinski's "A Tour of the Calculus" a shot. I happen to like Gil Strang's "Calculus", but not everyone does. Both books try to elucidate the key ideas behind the calculus. Berlinksi's book is informal and conversational. Strang's is conversational but more rigorous. Neither encourages reliance on rules, tricks, memorization, etc.

As long as we don't allow "Google says his statement is inconsistent with 78% of the published material on that subject" to be confused with "he's obviously lying" it could be very useful.

I don't know that I agree that it's that simple. I certainly agree that it will help to keep these two statements separated, but my problem is that in making even this comparison, you've blurred several others that must also be kept straight. That is, in order to get even as far as "78% of the published material" you msut define what "the published material" is.

Does it mean "lines of published material"? "bytes of published material"? Can I write a longer document and have it be counted more?

Does it mean "published documents"? Can I write twice as many documents and have it count more?

Does it mean "sites publishing the info"? That is, are you counting only separate sources? If you are, are you verifying they're really differently owned and controlled?

It sounds to me like there's a risk that Google is creating out of whole cloth a brand new industry, as they did with the industry of "getting you placement in search engines". This one will be "getting you placed in truth engines". Not that people didn't try to manipulate truth before. But if you centralize the evaluation of truth in such a way that you can finitely enumerate the choices, you allow greater manipulation of those with weak minds.

I have for a long time predicted that truth would be obfuscated by a flood of propaganda, a la Rivest's chaffing. I think this kind of centralization will accelerate the arrival and/or dominance of a world full of that. It's coming anyway, but no need to hurry it. We need time as a culture to prepare emotionally, socially, etc. It is simply not the same to say that technology we will eventually have is technology we can judiciously use today.

So far it doesn't seem any of the alternatives measure up.

That's a hard standard to beat. However, there's an interesting proposal from Ron Rivest (the 'R' in RSA) called Three Vote [PDF] you might be interested in. It proposes a system whereby each voter gets to keep a copy (receipt) of the vote he cast, but can't use the receipt to prove how he voted and every ballot cast is essentially 'put on a bulletin board' for public verification. An interesting system, which can be implemented using existing voting technology.

You are right that the unix administrator model is not very fine-grained... you are either root and all-powerful, or you are just a normal user.

But the real solution is not to make the current access control list system more complicated, but rather to move to a capabilities-based system.

None of this really has much to do with the problem we were talking about in X, which lets users read each others' keystrokes!

Well, like another poster said, don't dismiss CLR too soon--in my experience, most problems could be solved by clever applications of one or more simpler data structures, rather than a really advanced one. Regardless, take a look at the lecture notes (scribe notes are decent quality) for 6.897 at MIT: http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/classes/6.897/spring05/l ec.html
They cover a good sampling of recent and important results, at least theoretically important (some data structures that achieve a log log n speed up over basic ones you'd obviously never want to implement)

The moment you allow people to take back physical records of how they voted, you open up the possibility (or even inevitability) that people will start selling votes, or start being forced to vote a certain way.

A way around this has recently been published by Ronald L. Rivest as "The ThreeBallot Voting System" (PDF): http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/Rivest-TheThreeB allotVotingSystem.pdf

The idea is that people vote for/against an option by marking two/one column of three on their ballot paper, and select one column randomly to take home as a receipt. That receipt can contain anything, and so does not reveal their vote. Manipulating a ballot will run a 1 in 3 chance of being detected (provided people check their receipts), and thus cannot be done on a large scale.

I just wanted to point out an interesting method of creating a secure paper trail that came out recently (September 28th 2006) by Ronald L. Rivest of M.I.T's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It's called the ThreeBallot Voting System (.pdf format).

The interesting thing about it is that it handles both voter privacy and verifiability without requiring encryption of the ballot. Rather than give a poor explanation because of lack of space (the paper itself is 13 pages long), I encourage interested people to read it.

No, no, you don't hire black hats for industry. Instead, you have their daddy in the NSA protect them from prosecution, and help them get a job at MIT. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris for the description of Robert Morris and his career, and http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rtm/ for his work webpage.)

More seriously, the highly skilled black hats may make intelligent or crative employees due to their dedication, but having to ignore their tendency to break other people's tools makes them unsafe for anyone else in the department, especially their manager who has to deal with the consequences. And most black hats are simply not that good: the vast, vast majority of them are script kiddies, using the tools published by a skilled few to indulge in their abusive hobby.

Look at the $100 laptop they are touting for the 3rd world. Sure, its pretty basic, but do you honestly think that there wouldn't be people who would be perfectly happy with a basic machine that lets them view webpages and check their email and cost that little? I think they would sell like hotcakes, but the manufacturers would make ~$2.00 profit per sale and thus have no interest.

Actually, one of the (secondary) goals of the One Laptop per Child project is to bring these laptops in a commercial version to other markets. People have talked about selling them for $300 in developed countries.

In the press release (warning, PDF) announcing Quanta Computer Inc. will be the manufacturer of the $100 Laptop, they state "A commercial version of the machine will be explored in parallel." Quanta is the world's largest manufacturer of laptop PCs, they work for Dell, HP and IBM.

is MRI for Magneto Rotational?

I have seen PMatlab, MatlabMPI paper recently ( http://www.ll.mit.edu/MatlabMPI/ )
Though have no time to implement/check it ...

Can you describe the bit about Gates lying in federal court?

The emerging automotive DC power standard is 42V, not 48V.

http://lees-web.mit.edu/consortium.htm

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/pressrel eases/20031208a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v428/n6985/ab s/nature02470.html

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/pluto.html

http://biocab.org/Cosmic_Rays_Graph.html#anchor_77

http://biocab.org/Global_Warming.html#anchor_32

Now I'd like to see someone try to blame the system wide warming on our driving SUV's. I'm sure someone out there will. LOL!!!!

Here's a very informative speech delivered this past Monday on the US Senate floor by senator James Inhofe Chairman, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It's not your normal uninformed rant we've come to expect from our politicians. http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id= 263759

Until then, several of the really good colleges have open courseware that you should start working with in your spare time:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare

Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon

My first suggestion is to find some other students at your school interested in computer science. A school isn't going to add a computer science course unless there is a sizable amount of students who are interested. After you find other interested students, get a proposal for a new class going. Get a few signatures of students and parents (and maybe some interested teachers) and take it to the principal's office (or whomever else deals with course offerings). If it works, then great. If not, then try again next year.

In the meanwhile, I suggest that you read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs . This is the book that is used for the freshman computer science class at MIT. Find yourself a Scheme interpreter (and maybe even invest some time into learning Unix and maybe installing Linux or BSD if you're a Windows user. Unix, not Windows, is the main operating system used in computer science.). This book can get difficult, but you'll be very knowledgeable about the true meaning of computer science via that book. Then, after reading and finishing that book, then move on to learning C (for structured programming) and C++ or Java (for OO programming). Now that you have the theoretical background of programming understood, now you should learn some practical programming languages that you'll use for upper-division CS courses (operating systems, software engineering, systems programming, and the like) and in future industry jobs or research.

Finally, during your junior year of high school, start finding some good CS schools to apply to. MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, University of Texas at Austin, Harvey Mudd, and others that I've forgot now are very good undergraduate computer science schools. These schools are challenging enough to fully teach you computer science and prepare you for either a career in software engineering and development, or a research career.

I wish you a successful start in computer science.

But of course I am and have been aware that "software" does enjoy copyright protections.

Oh, so you know that software has IP protection from copyrights even if it's not patented...

Then Stallman drops the bombshell: he doesn't believe a software developer should have any right to protect its intellectual property in the first place.

...but you still claimed that having no software patents would remove any rights of software developers to IP protection. You made this deliberately false assertion (in your original post)...

...I was trying to goad the "dude" into explaining to me why a copyright is inherently better for the software industry than a patent.

... in order to antagonise someone (who had not yet even posted in the discussion). But now you'd like to have a sensible discussion of the issue. Very well then:

the fact is you need both copyright and patent protections.

Actually, this is disputed by many people, and many of those are software developers. There have been many good reasons put forward in support of the view that software patents stifle innovation. Good enough for the EU, for example, to reject the software patent directive. Since you are not a software developer but a lawyer, and not a patent lawyer, it's really up to you to provide some reason why copyright is inadequate. You could start by:
1 - Addressing what patents and copyrights are for (refer to the US constitution) "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" and showing how (if) software patents produce a net increase of innovation in software compared to not having software patents.
2 - Explaining why some-one like Bill Gates, who surely understands the issue of IP protection for software, made this statement in 1991 "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." if software patents help innovation.
3 - Read and refute this anti-software patent statement released by Oracle, one of the largest idependent software producers.

Really, it's fairly obvious: we have copyrights and patents to provide protection for different things. I am not aware of anything in the history of copyright and patent law that has been protected by patents and copyrights other than software. I have seen no convincing arguement that providing both copyright and patent protection to software increases the progress of "science and the arts". Indeed, everything I have heard in favour of patents focuses primarily on the developers rights, yet the rights granted to temporary monopoly through patents are a means to an end, not the end itself. Patent law/practice that give temporary monopoly to the detriment of the progess of science and the arts is unconstitutional. As you said, idealism is not a legal argument. Legal arguments can be made very effectively from the constitution though. That's what it's for.

The patent protects the functionality of the software, among other things.

This is a significant problem. It is that ideas are being patented, rather than inventions. Functionality rather than invention. Imagine if during the development of carburettors a patent had been issued for a "device that increases fuel efficiency of engines" rather than the actual improvement. The fuel injector would have been illegal! You referred to Edison patenting the light bulb - light bulbs were an invention, not an idea. He did not patent "method of producing light". If someone had come up with a different way to produce light that was equal

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."

Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software. The Company believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections, as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software developments.

He's awesome and all, but c'mon. Maybe President Hockfield has a totally different take on webcomic micropayments. Or maybe there was a vote at the last faculty meeting to not conduct this interview.

One technology that I've actually seen bridging that gap, is Rails.

>>even trivial tasks like a for-loop you have to either code yourself or rely on non-portable extensions.

WRONG!

From the R5RS documentation:
        'Do' is an iteration construct. It specifies a set of variables to be bound, how they are to be initialized at the start, and how they are to be updated on each iteration. When a termination condition is met, the loop exits after evaluating the s. ...

(do ((vec (make-vector 5))
          (i 0 (+ i 1)))
        ((= i 5) vec)
    (vector-set! vec i i))

http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/r5rs_6.html#SE C36

``Algol 60 had lexical scoping and predated Scheme by many years.''

Thanks for the correction. What about the other features I mentioned? Was I right about those?

``At issue is not what Scheme has, at issue is what it lacks.''

That may be how you want to frame the discussion, but I won't go along with that. Many things that are ostensibly lacking from Scheme can be added, whereas things that are included can't be taken away. See my earlier comment about exceptions.

``Many languages have call/cc or equivalent constructs.''

From the top of my head, I can name Scheme, Ruby, and SML/NJ. Which ones did I miss?

``Scheme, however, lacks a standard vocabulary to talk effectively about many common constructs, and defining everything yourself doesn't solve that.''

It does, however, give you insight in how they are implemented, and how they could be implemented. That can be useful, too. This is what I meant when I said it depends on what level you want to talk about things.

``Using Scheme to talk about computer science is like trying to talk about philosophy using a first year high-school French vocabulary.''

Which has disadvantages, but also advantages. For example, you can learn all of Scheme very quickly, meaning you can establish a common basis for discussion quickly. Once you have that, you can start talking about higher level concepts. The fun part is that you can usually take Scheme up to higher level concepts much quicker than with many larger languages. Look at SICP, for example: it teaches Scheme, functional programming, imperative programming, data structures, lazy evaluation, interpreters and compilers, and it all fits in one course.

``Also, there have been plenty of exception systems discussed in the literature; I'm not aware of any of them that were first described in Scheme. Usually, they are described in English and pseudo-code, and implemented in C or assembly.''

Maybe it depends on the environment you're in. I learned a lot about programming, languages, and implementation from people who knew Scheme, so, naturally, we used Scheme for examples a lot. I know other people who use Java for examples a lot (or actually pseudo-Java; they usually leave out the type annotations).

``As for your first statement, sure, any language can be tailored to be useful in a particular domain. Can you name such a domain for Scheme? I can't.''

Ah, but I was only refuting your claim that no language can be useful without extensive libraries. I wasn't talking about Scheme, specifically.

If you do want examples of what Scheme has been successfully used for, well, some examples:

  - As a vehicle for teaching the fundamentals of programming, programming languages, and computers (see, for example, SICP and the courses based on it)
  - As an extension language (in festival, for example)
  - I've used Scheme for a few projects: a text processing language (transforming text with embedded code to multiple output formats), a sudoku-solver, a network simulator, an HTML-generation library. I've also used it to prototype algorithms that I later implemented in Java.
  - Other people have implemented mail filters, web frameworks, wiki's, theorem provers, and probably countless other things in Scheme

And, of course, when you look beyond the standardized core language and consider the implementations, you can find some more impressive examples, like DrScheme (at least, I think that's written in MzScheme).

Here's another(video lectures). Make sure to read the book as well. Both the book and the videos are free.

Here's another(video lectures). Make sure to read the book as well. Both the book and the videos are free.

are both tools of beauty that have taught me more about programming and problem-solving than all other languages combined. SICP and PAIP are both classics in this regard that everyone should rush out and get now.

It's just such a pity that, since they're both standards which anyone can implement, lots of people do, and as a result, finding one you like and then getting it to talk to other languages and libraries can be a very frustrating experience. And languages like Python with one canonical implementation driven by a BDFL and with exceptional library support are just getting more Lisp-like, which can't be good news for for a renaissance in Lisp or Scheme. Pity really, since I really like 'em both...

Actually, I have been carrying around R5RS with me for a while; it will be nice to suck down more print quota on r5r6 (when it is released). Scheme is quite a fun language, though as far as Lisps go, I do prefer Common. Still, for people who want to learn how to program, I generally tell them to start out with Scheme, usually using the PLT stuff, and to look at SICP.

You laugh, but actually there were several attempts at the MIT Media Lab to build animal-interface gadgets! See here. It's an interesting thought exercise, with relevance to interface design for the disabled, too.

...the absence of either: 1) Quirk-compatible implementations of old-school BASIC interpreters for modern machines, or 2) Relevant, currently usable example programs in children's math textbooks.

NOT the absence of "programming for kids".

Though, if you really thinking simple, instant-gratification, learning languages aren't available for young protoprogrammers today, might I suggest looking at StarLogo TNG (and its 2d relative, OpenStarLogo).

Also, a number of less education-focussed languages have many of the features that made BASIC accessible to young learners (an immediate interpreter environment, friendly vocabulary compared to, say, C's intimidating, punctuation-heavy syntax), like REBOL.

I can't see that there is a real problem here in terms of availability of suitable languages for learning.