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• Kids don't always remember details. This can be difficult, because most computer langauges are not forgiving in their syntax. Kids are good at picking up on details, but don't expect them to memorize things like StupidConfusingClassname isn't the same as stupid_confusing_classname.
• Kids like feedback. Thus, the read-eval-print-loop style is important toward keeping their interest.
• Related to that, the intrinsic graphical nature of logo is very engaging.
• This really just a general teaching comment (which I was totally new to when this project was given to me) - especially with totally new topics, kids will have all kinds of levels of ability and interest in the topic. It's important to have something that all of them can do, but also to have something to challenge the kids having an easier time of it. I would ususally introduce a simple topic and have everyone try it out, and then I would have a "master" level problem for the wiz kids to try.
• Robustness and responsiveness is good; kids aren't very patient, as a rule, and if the programming environment crashes, or performs slowly (and Starlogo, being a Java app, did run poorly on those iBooks), the kids will lose interest in it while they wait for the app.

Like most geeks of a certain age, I cut my coding teeth on BASIC, which in its traditional implementations (TRS-80, Apple ][, C64) was nicely interactive, but probably too boringly textual for Kids These Days.® Don't know how the "modern" versions of it compare.

Logo became available to me after I was "too advanced" for it, but certainly deserves a look as the "other" classical language for introductory programming.

I've heard some good things about Toon Talk.

Or there's always BrainFuck.

That's all the more reason to listen to The End-to-End Argument [PDF]. (Wiki link if you don't want a PDF.)

Never trust the network!

Although, I suppose VPNs technically don't adhere to the end-to-end argument, exactly..

A college friend has been doing this for the last few years with great success. Go figure...

TrueCrypt no longer uses CBC in the latest versions, LRW mode has been the default mode since some time in the 4.1 version and beyond.

Yeah - watch out for these dodgy people!

If you can't find a way to sync your iPod with your Linux machine you haven't really been looking!

When will we get to mod articles "-1, Troll"?

You can hear a reference to this in this speech by evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker. He talks about Chomsky's influence on him starting around 1H 10 min into the talk. He refers to evolution around 1:19.

Kind of odd that you're arguing this after reading something by a man whose own theories run counter to general evolutionary theory. :)

In context you say? Funny, I read the context as being part of Cade and his rabble's pie-in-the-sky wishes of what they'd do when they got power. Stuff like seven loaves of bread for the price of 2, or make weak beer illegal. Silly things not thought through. Impulses, not serious planning to become a tyrant.

So couldn't it be said that Shakespeare was saying it was a common impulse to want to kill all the lawyers?

The RIAA does little to stifle that impulse.

Decavitator

Python developer, I think this is great. I'm glad that Python is gaining more acceptance.

Javascript, PHP and now Python. A real rogues gallery of languages, each more ill-conceived and vomitous than the last. Use scheme. The language is simpler than the others yet for more expressive and powerful. Learn something. Use it!

I think it is a good thing that Microsoft invited hackers to try to attack the system before it is released. A lot of people are saying how the black-hats will get a head start and not tell anybody the bugs they find. However, these guys would have found the bugs in the future anyways, and would exploit them. If one hole is found and patched, the system is safer already. These type of exercises are conducted in cryptography too. Ex: RSA offered a reward for anybody who can decrypt some of their keys, their 200 decimial digit key was factored using parallel computers, but it was found that it would take 55 years on a normal computer to crack the key. It gave them a good idea about what size keys they need to protect information for long enough (i.e. long enough so your credit card expires before someone can decrypt your transaction and buy stuff with your card, etc). Here is an interesting article I read in a class about other systems failing: http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/papers/wcf.pdf. Banks and ATM machine makers just tested their machines internally before putting the ATMs to use. What happened? People found ways to withdraw money from ATM machines from other accounts, people figured out how to crack pins, how to clone other ATM cards and accounts,... tons of hacks. And this was fairly recent, in the 1990s. Having one internal group to test the security is not enough. Inviting the whole world to test the security before release is much better. What would be best is if Microsoft offered some source code too (much like Linux), so the hackers can have complete information. That way most of the problems can be found and fixed beforehand. But that would never happen since they are corporation and their primary goal is to make money. But inviting attackers is a step in the right direction. What is unfortunate is the deadlines. The shareholders want it released so they can make some more money. The media is trying to make it sound like Microsoft programmers are incompetent. Security is a "negative" goal. It is easy to prove that a system can be broken, you just come up with one hack, one example. However, how do you prove that a system cannot be broken? You have to try every single possible attack. Prolem is you don't know what the attacks are. It takes time to make sure security is at an acceptable level before it is released.

Even without groups of people, individual predictions of phenomena for which there is a common intuition can be surprisingly accurate. See "Optimal predictions in everyday cognition", reviewed in the Economist.

Every single school, from the community college on up, is going to do everything it can to convince its alumni, students, faculty, and benefactors that it's doing useful and important work. Even "MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc." issue the exact same kind of PR. It's necessary everywhere.

The Bad Thing is confusing the explanation in the PR with the real research or discovery, or assuming that it's actually important because the school PR office thought it sounded neat. Which is how Roland Piquepaille wound up propagating the PR writer's mistake on the terminology ("demultiplier").

That's one form of distorting what I said that sounds suspiciously close to some form of jesuit debating technique. Did you study at a jesuit school?

Actually I went to fairly standard state schools before reading Physics at Keble College, Oxford.

I never wrote that science is the "be all and end all of life". What I wrote is that it's wrong to believe something, anything at all, is that "be all and end all of life", the way religious people think about their religion. Scientists do not think like that.

Actually you said that having everything be inferior to religion is wrong and that having a single work of "one of the most outstanding scientists of antiquity" written over by a single unknown monk was "an excellent argument against religion in general." It seems a little harsh to condemn religion on the basis of one unknown man's actions, so I surmised that your view of science was very high. Perhaps I overestimated your view, but given the venom you displayed towards religion, it was very much the way you came across.

When you have a scientific approach to life you get to be more or less protected from such mistakes.

Science can't be applied to every area of life and it's not meant to be. If you tried to, you'd be making a terrible mistake, or applying science incorrectly.

You tend to approach situations with caution, you tend to analyze before believing things blindly, you do not assume that anything is the "be all and end all of life" because you know that you can be mistaken.

And here you appear to have made a mistake. It would seem that you are implying that those who follow a religion do so blindly, a statement made without sound analysis, abandoning caution and blindly assuming something that is completely without truth. And the decision to have Christ as the be all and end all of life is a carefully reasoned one that makes sense in light of the facts at hand, rather than being an assumption.

I find it interesting the Maxwell and Faraday, arguably two of the finest scientific minds the British Isles have produced, had zero problems with this attitude, something that could be said of the many other scientists who call Jesus their Lord.

Michael Faraday:

And therefore, brethren, we ought to value the privilege of knowing God's truth far beyond anything we can have in this world. The more we see the perfection of God's law fulfilled in Christ, the more we ought to thank God for His unspeakable gift.

James Clerk Maxwell

Now my great plan, which was conceived of old, ... is to let nothing be wilfully left unexamined. Nothing is to be holy ground consecrated to Stationary Faith, whether positive or negative. All fallow land is to be ploughed up and a regular system of rotation followed. ... Never hide anything, be it weed or no, nor seem to wish it hidden. ... Again I assert the Right of Trespass on any plot of Holy Ground which any man has set apart. ... Now I am convinced that no one but a Christian can actually purge his land of these holy spots. ... I do not say that no Christians have enclosed places of this sort. Many have a great deal, and every one has some. But there are extensive and important tracts in the territory of the Scoffer, the Pantheist, the Quietist, Formalist, Dogmatist, Sensualist, and the rest, which are openly and solemnly Tabooed. ...
Christianity - that is, the religion of the Bible - is the only scheme or form of belief which disavows any possessions on such a tenure. Here alone all is free. You may fly to the ends of the world and find no God but the Author of Salvation. You may search the Scriptures and not find a

While looking for inexpensive ways to extend my home wireless coverage to a detatched garage, I came across the MIT Roofnet project. It's a mesh network to deliver internet access to off-campus students using reflashed Netgear WGT634U. Their software is available to download, but it doesn't look like there has been much work done on it lately. There's also information about a test deployment in Boston; how many nodes used, overall coverage, etc. I can't imagine it being much more work to make the nodes solar powered and perhaps somewhat portable. This could easily help bridge the OLPC mesh networks (at least between areas with good LOS).

While looking for inexpensive ways to extend my home wireless coverage to a detatched garage, I came across the MIT Roofnet project. It's a mesh network to deliver internet access to off-campus students using reflashed Netgear WGT634U. Their software is available to download, but it doesn't look like there has been much work done on it lately. There's also information about a test deployment in Boston; how many nodes used, overall coverage, etc. I can't imagine it being much more work to make the nodes solar powered and perhaps somewhat portable. This could easily help bridge the OLPC mesh networks (at least between areas with good LOS).

# And now comes this OSS issue. Once again, these Europeans appear to be a bit ahead.

Is this perhaps what you meant to link to?

Net neutrality is this:

If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

That's all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.

Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.

Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.

There have been suggestions that we don't need legislation because we haven't had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past -- it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred.

Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.

Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can't photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.

Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.

I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.

There has also been some confusion over authorship. Mr. Lee is not to be
confused with Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and NetNeutrality proponent.

Yes. But it is Congress that makes laws about patents and copyrights

What you suggest sounds like this:

Secret Ballot Receipts:
http://crypto.csail.mit.edu/~rivest/voting/papers/ Chaum-SecretBallotReceiptsTrueVoterVerifiableElect ions.pdf

Really, really brilliant idea.

a huge asteriod hitting earth

due to some natural/un-natural process, a virus/bacteria gets created which splits water to its elemental components.

If there are no working prototypes, how did Kofi Annan present one at the World Summit on Information Society?

Well, the word "hack" and "hacker" originates from the hardware side of things. Rewiring circuits and fiddling with non standard ideas to get some circuit to work etc. Software hacking is really a latecomer, and what he did qualifies to be called "hacking".

Where they run into problems is anything more advanced than high school math, understanding of algorithms, etc.

Assuming they can't pick up a book and learn it yourself (imagine that!) - which he did, by the way.

Also, their skill portability is very limited so getting laid off would likely be a bigger blow than if they had a better grounding in the maths.

I'm curious - do you have a specific anecdote to back up this generalization? Because my experience has been that employers place greater weight on hard business experience than theoretical knowledge. I encountered one recruiter who posited it was so bad ("uneducated" coders with experience beating out inexperienced comp sci majors) that he wanted to see the IT equivalent of State Bar Associations (i.e. no coding with out a license!).

The only thing a Masters in Computer Science seems to be good for is justifying a role in middle management (where, ironically, one typically does very little coding) - and that's true of just about every professional career field, not just IT. Associates at Investment Banks typically need an MBA (which they never use) before being hired into a VP role. Journalists seek Journalism degrees, hospital executives need Masters in Health Care Management, etc. etc.

In a 'free market' scenario, patents will still exist in that the Monopoly will have the power to enforce its own 'patents' without the help of the government. Agreed?

In that case, the middle-ground would be some antitrust regulations, with some very light patent/IP protections (to ensure the adequate return on R&D investment)?

This is called "chaffing", and it was proposed by none other than Ron Rivest. There is a paper on his website describing it. It seems like a natural way to implement something like this.

So, who wants to hack on this?

OK, I'll hand it to you. Let me state your position: computers are just bullshit in education. They're just for drawing nice graphs and powerpoints. There's nothing to be gained in understanding from programming a virtual ant and seeing how the behavior of 100.000 virtual ants compares with the behavior of real ants. You can learn anything just by looking at real ants. You can do the same with real cars, of course, I suppose. Yes, I'm being ironic. That's because I've nothing against learning with real stuff. And with real teachrs. That's the point: you need real people, stuff, and teachers, and the computers can make that a much richer environment. I don't support computers for feeding you information and losing teachers and interactions. I don't think you even tried to skim the references I gave you, but I'll try another one, one final time. Give me the benefit of the doubt: if I provide all this links perhaps there could be something interesting in them: Alan Kay: "Computers, Networks and Education" http://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/alan-kay .pdf

There's not much of a difference between your toys and transformers. And nothing wrong with using your toys! Computers are not being proposed by OLPC to replace other toys, just as extra ones that can make a difference. Check out this: http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects.php And if you think that's not for third-world countries, check this out: it is in use in Brazil, Thailand... http://padthai.media.mit.edu:8080/cocoon/gogosite/ home.xsp?lang=en

There's not much of a difference between your toys and transformers. And nothing wrong with using your toys! Computers are not being proposed by OLPC to replace other toys, just as extra ones that can make a difference. Check out this: http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects.php And if you think that's not for third-world countries, check this out: it is in use in Brazil, Thailand... http://padthai.media.mit.edu:8080/cocoon/gogosite/ home.xsp?lang=en

i highly doubt the laptop supports all of India's 33-odd "recognized languages", disregarding others commonly taught in schools (Arabic, Farsi, etc). The vernacular lobbies would have a field day claiming that the government is deliberately excluding their languages. Which is a valid point. People would sue the government and the education boards.

The thing which I think you should bear in mind is that the tool used is nowhere near as important as the teacher using it.

I think you are 100% correct. Unfortunately, I didn't know that at the time.

If it's any comfort, there's a lot of people in IT who didn't start out there

Actually, it is a comfort. Since I do not have the where-with-all to go back to school at this time, I am learning what I can in my spare time. MIT rocks. http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

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Clever trolls are master baiters of the worst kind.

Tomcat 5.5 pure Java application and web server can match Apache speeds for many cases.

Again with the speed comparisons to apache-httpd? Please compare features with apache-httpd, but speed with any of thttpd, lighttpd or and-httpd (or insert any number of actually efficient webservers here).

I think it's fair to say that one of the problems with "higher than C" languages is that in many ways it's harder to do efficiently than C. Which explains why most of the slowest/hugest applications on my desktop are all Java and python based.

Specifically, about the origins of Zork here In the Beginning

Of course, it's very Infocom centric. Well, it is MIT, birthplace of Zork, after all.

Specifically, about the origins of Zork here In the Beginning

Of course, it's very Infocom centric. Well, it is MIT, birthplace of Zork, after all.

Already been done by some Greek dude about 22 centuries ago...

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a pretty good book.

It's actually pretty easy[0]. Examples of the method can be seen in scientific papers[1] and text-only publishing formats such as electronic mailing lists[2].

[0] http://www.answers.com/easy
[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-news/debian-news-20 06/msg00029.html

better yet why dont they use a version of Kerberos ?? seems to be this is more secure.. as it requires a normal password but also you have a pin number that displays a separate password to authenticate the user on the client side.

I am a student that works in the Adaptive Technologies for Information and Computing (ATIC) Lab at MIT. You can find our website at http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/

Our website lists plenty of pointing devices but like you said, they require the use of a thumb. What I would recommend is that your friend obtain voice recognition software like one user of our lab who also has wrist problems. For example, use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for text entry and navigation:

http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/tools/voice.html

Feel free to browse around the website for information about RSI and ergonomics. Unfortunately, the lab is only open to MIT students and faculty.

I am a student that works in the Adaptive Technologies for Information and Computing (ATIC) Lab at MIT. You can find our website at http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/

Our website lists plenty of pointing devices but like you said, they require the use of a thumb. What I would recommend is that your friend obtain voice recognition software like one user of our lab who also has wrist problems. For example, use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for text entry and navigation:

http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/tools/voice.html

Feel free to browse around the website for information about RSI and ergonomics. Unfortunately, the lab is only open to MIT students and faculty.

• Avoiding RSI
• Some tips
• Preventing and healing* Carpal Tunnel Syndrome & Repetitive Stress Injuries
• Posture for a Healthy Back

http://www.naturalpoint.com/ cost $199 - $399
http://www.cameramouse.com/ cost $299 - $429

http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/tools/mice.html $45 touchpad - $299
http://www.enablemart.com/productdetail.aspx?store =10&pid=174&dept=12 cost ???

Contact the GSA's CITA (http://www.gsa.gov/Portal/gsa/ep/contentView.do?c ontentId=9815&contentType=GSA_OVERVIEW) and let them know what issues you are having. They can probably tell you about some devices you haven't heard about before.

http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/reference/tech/altmous e.html
http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/tools/mice.html

~Gildas (too lazy to log in)

high speed interface with zero lag

Actually IIRC there is significant lag of ca. 0.3-0.5 secs between input reaching your sensory organs and cerebrum reaction. Your brains just pretends to itself that it has zero lag. Reference IIRC somewhere in here,

Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP) should occur at the end-points of the network.

See "End-to-end arguments in system design" by Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark:

This principle was used by DARPA when it worked on Internet design and it's the reason TCP/IP communications have experienced massive growth.

It's a principle supported by almost everyone except the backbone owners. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him and if you're going to make a profit off them then he wants a cut too (referring to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al who oppose Net Neut).

An example of a non-net-neut service is a cell-phone. I'm no fan of government regulation, but I don't want my ISP bill to start looking like my cell-phone bill.

This is hardly cutting edge;
Case Western Reserver University started a program like this 5 years ago using Lego Mindstorms kits, and I'm sure they weren't the first. This is seperate from the higher-level Autonomous Robotics (aka Lego Lab) course that's been going on since 1995 and is based largely on MIT's 6.270 Autonomous Robot course that created the Handy Board.

The link you published, http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/asedeno/vmware/ vmware-console-distrib/doc/EULA, seems to be a EULA for the VMware console distribution, not for VMware server.