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Interesting you say that. What MIT product would he be contacted about? The Media Lab site has no reference to any product of this capability that I could find.

Or you might be interested in the OrcBoard robotic controller, which is open source (schematics, layout, firmware, userland tools all GPL). It's being used by a number of robotics classes (6.188, 2.12), and a robotics competition (MASLab) at MIT.

It's a bit different than mindstorms in that it's designed to be used as a slave to a laptop or other more CPU-rich device. But you can use it in stand-alone mode too, if your robots are simple.

-Ed
(disclaimer: creator of orcboard)

Or you might be interested in the OrcBoard robotic controller, which is open source (schematics, layout, firmware, userland tools all GPL). It's being used by a number of robotics classes (6.188, 2.12), and a robotics competition (MASLab) at MIT.

It's a bit different than mindstorms in that it's designed to be used as a slave to a laptop or other more CPU-rich device. But you can use it in stand-alone mode too, if your robots are simple.

-Ed
(disclaimer: creator of orcboard)

Or you might be interested in the OrcBoard robotic controller, which is open source (schematics, layout, firmware, userland tools all GPL). It's being used by a number of robotics classes (6.188, 2.12), and a robotics competition (MASLab) at MIT.

It's a bit different than mindstorms in that it's designed to be used as a slave to a laptop or other more CPU-rich device. But you can use it in stand-alone mode too, if your robots are simple.

-Ed
(disclaimer: creator of orcboard)

• Cosmic Microwave Background: The residual heat of the big bang, redshifted (cooled) by ~13 billion years of expansion. This temperature is given in terms of the Stefan-Boltzmann relation (blackbody temperature), and basically represents the average temperature of the whole universe, including the vast, cold, empty intergalactic regions.
• Interstellar Medium: A very diffuse (though still dense compared to the intergalactic regions) cloud of ionized gas filling the whole galaxy. These ionized particles move around very quickly, i.e., they're very hot (Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution). 7000K +/- 2000K according to this synopsis, at least for regions near the heliosphere.
• Heliosphere: The gaseous bubble surrounding the sun out to about 100AU (Voyager 1 hit the termination shock where it meets the ISM at 94AU). It's hotter and denser than the interstellar medium, and it's where any space probe we launch would be travelling. Of course, since there is so little gas in even the heliosphere (its pressure would be considered a hard vacuum on Earth), these temperatures have very little effect on any spacecraft.

That's not any sort of fundamental law though, that's just how it happens to be currently.

As development continues, I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that someday power generation without any serious side effects may be possible. I'm looking forward to improved mirror-focused solar plants, personally. Basically, an Archimedes death ray that powers steam turbines instead of burning ships.

Unless someone cares to enlighten me with the serious downfalls of that strategy? I can't think of any.

In Nevada, among other security measures, the state has a copies of the code used in all slot machines and audits machines to make sure they haven't been modified from the reference versions. Gamblers can request an immediate investigation of any machine they believe may have cheated them. After all, money is at stake. It would be nice to have at least the same level of security for our vote.

  Links to NY Times article "MAKING VOTES COUNT - Gambling on Voting",
  contrasting slot machine and voting machine security

http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/voting/press/nyt /2004-06-13%20NYT%20Gambling%20on%20Voting.pdf (PDF)
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-31.htm (no registration required)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/opinion/13SUN1.h tml (registration required)

It's nice to know Unisys's heart-warming corporate culture hasn't changed over the past few years. Ah yes, I remember well the days of the great GIF Patent Shakedown indeed! Bastards.

First thing that springs to mind is the $100 laptop?. That aside, this isn't too far fetched, given that you can get a dell computer with monitor for about $400. Less, without.

1. Transcends distance, darkness, and physical barriers.
2. Transcends time and its records can easily be stored, retrieved, combined, analyzed, and communicated.
3. Is capital-rather than labor intensive.
4. Triggers a shift from targeting a specific to categorical suspicion.
5. Has as a major concern the prevention of violations.
6. Is decentralized-and triggers self-policing.
7. Is either invisible or has low visibility.
8. Is more intensive-probing beneath surface, discovering previously inaccessible information.
9. Grows ever more extensive-covering not only deeper, but larger areas.

I think surveillance, even when used with the best of intentions, will interfere with people's lives. The authorities will investigate anyone that does anything different. Yet doing things different is what life is all about. When used with less noble intentions, surveillance could lead to a much more troubling society as the East Berlin residents. described in the article may well remember.

It was going to be a real nasty fooking war if it happened and very likely the West would have started tossing nukes first because the Warsaw Pact had greatly superior quantities of ground forces.

*sigh* Did no one pay attention to the end of the Cold War, when archives flew open we found out that a lot of those quantities were exaggerated?

Keep in mind that, in the event of war, the Soviets would have had to keep a lot of their force in reserve just in case their pals in China decided to have a rematch near the Ussuri river, that a lot of Soviet troops were on economic duties at home (road repair, consstruction, agriculture), that several Republics in the USSR were unhappy and troops would have to be kept behind there to ensure against revolt, and that satellite states would have to have big garisons kept there, too (especially in Poland), lest they revolt.

Then you run into the geographical problem: even with those constraints, there are more Soviet troops than NATO ones available (though the ratio is less than than 3:1 in favor of the Soviets, and there's that pesky "quality of troops and equipment" issue), but those Soviet troops have to go through certain geographical areas. If I'm the lone guy defending a room against ten guys, I'm not all that worried if they all have to come in through a few doors.

Then there is the logistical problem on the Soviet side: their logistics was not terribly good, and wartime conditions were not likely to improve them. (he fact of different train gauges between Poland and Russia was a major, major constraint on the Soviet ability to invade Western Europe.)

Yeah, I know NATO figures and US miltiary figures were painting an image of the mighty Soviet forces who would, with 175 Soviet divisions and 75 satellite ones, march West and crash through all NATO defenses without breaking a sweat. They were exagerrating quite a bit, and what's more, there was reason to think they were exagerrating at the time. Don't believe me? Go back and read some back issues of International Security from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Matthew Evangelista's Stalin's Postwar Army Reappraised, appearing in International Security, Winter 1982/1983, Vol 7, No 3, and also in Soviet Military Policy. In particular, comparisons that match raw numbers of Soviet divisions against NATO ones neglected that NATO divisions had many more people in them than Soviet ones, and figures known to be overstated were repeated again and again over the years. (The figure of 175 Soviet and 75 satellite divisions, for instance, arose in the late 1940s, was soon discredited, but was drug out and used pretty much until the Soviet Union collapsed.)

One could argue that the type of exagerration and threat inflation which we've seen in respect to Iraq began in the Cold War era.

I personally wonder every time I hear a nice round number mentioned with regard to al-Qaida. The oft-mentioned claim that "10,000 people went through al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan," for instance makes me really, really suspicious that it is an inflated number.

Anyway, I'm getting away from my original point, which is that there are many reasons to doubt the "Soviet tide" theory that NATO would have been swiftly overwhelmed by the mighty Soviet legions. Those legions look a lot less impressive when you are aware of their shoddy training, terrible leadership, bad equipment and the difficulties that the Soviet Union would have faced in wartime. (Smaller subsets of the Soviet military-like the Spetnaz units, would have probably performed better, but you don't win a conventional war by having good Special Forces units and a lousy regular army.) I'm not surprised to see the old "Soviet tide" chestnut repeated here, since Americans (and, to a lesser degree, Britons) were bombarded with it in the media (who seem incapable of doing a good job of reporting

Also of note: (1) The official library of congress catalog information lists the author as T. F. Peterson, which is in itself a hack, T.F. Peterson is part of the hacking tradition, the full fictional name is: Institute Historian T. F. Peterson (IHTFP). (2) MIT's home page on 12/25 featured this spotlight: Hacky Holidays.

At MIT, all Athena workstations have the same root password, which is freely distributed. Any user can get the root password by typing in tellme root at a console. There are thousands of these machines scattered all around campus, with many different hardware configurations. This has been policy for many years now. Sometimes you get stupid kids doing stuff like this, but other than that, it seems to have been working...

At MIT, all Athena workstations have the same root password, which is freely distributed. Any user can get the root password by typing in tellme root at a console. There are thousands of these machines scattered all around campus, with many different hardware configurations. This has been policy for many years now. Sometimes you get stupid kids doing stuff like this, but other than that, it seems to have been working...

The Intel brand was ranked #5 for Business Week's 2005 Global Brands Scoreboard just below Coke, Microsoft, IBM & GE, with a brand value of $35.6 billion.

They must have done something right... some combination of image, cost, and core-values. Seems Intel stives to have all employees aligning with these values. That 1994 Pentium bug could have really damaged the brand, but they managed it by apologizing, recalling and replacing at a cost of $300 million.

this is a great list of MIT pranks.

My favourite computer prank on the list has got to be the 6.001 spellbook handout

I need to go to MIT....

//kohaku

this is a great list of MIT pranks.

My favourite computer prank on the list has got to be the 6.001 spellbook handout

I need to go to MIT....

//kohaku

Hacking at MIT was dealt a serious blow when the trespassing fine was increased to $500 from a more tolerable $50. Many of the more famous hacks involved placing large objects or decorations on MIT's iconic domes. The main motivation according to MIT's authorities is "safety".

... can be found at http://hacks.mit.edu/

I say it may be strong enough because I haven't seen any attempt at formally proving this. Of course a formal proof would be nice. If I see one and is able to verify it, I will immediately start recommending LRW mode.

LRW mode is an instantiation of a tweakable mode of operation, which comes with a proof of security by Liskov, Rivest, and Wagner. http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/LiskovRivestWagn er-TweakableBlockCiphers.pdf

(LRW stands for Liskov, Rivest, Wagner)

$50 and a warning is, let's face it, a tiny slap on the wrist.

Unfortunately, MIT agrees with you. They've taken the $50 through some crazy inflation calculator to say that they might fine students up to $500. Definitely not a slap on the wrist anymore. And these are college students at fairly expensive school - they have much better places to be spending $500 on.

Ever heard the phrase "chilling effect"?

Can be found here. Unfortunately it ends in 2004...

One of the favorite ones that I witnessed firsthand was the police car on top of the MIT dome.

I also get a kick out of all the hacks that MIT has pulled off at the Havard/Yale football games. One at least one of those occasions the local papers stated that MIT had won the game. (In fact I seem to recall they DID win, technically, by hacking into the scoreboard and changing the score during one game)

Can be found here. Unfortunately it ends in 2004...

One of the favorite ones that I witnessed firsthand was the police car on top of the MIT dome.

I also get a kick out of all the hacks that MIT has pulled off at the Havard/Yale football games. One at least one of those occasions the local papers stated that MIT had won the game. (In fact I seem to recall they DID win, technically, by hacking into the scoreboard and changing the score during one game)

In this video, MIT's Samuel Jay Keyser discusses the culture and history of hacks at MIT; he's for them. You can read excerpts from the Nightwork book on the MIT alumni site.

In this video, MIT's Samuel Jay Keyser discusses the culture and history of hacks at MIT; he's for them. You can read excerpts from the Nightwork book on the MIT alumni site.

The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across... and how to run from the authorities.

The recent Wright Flyer hack - the same one that gave the university much positive publicity - resulted in severe consequences: the students have a mark against their permanent record, and were fined $50. They were about to change the fine for being caught on the roof to a maximum of $500, but the students succesfully petitioned to change that to 10 hours of community service - because students said that if there was a possible $500 fine, hackers would be more willing to run and seriously injure themselves than risk getting caught by the police.

Of course MIT has the legal responsibility if someone falls from a roof, but there ought to be a way to cover that without punishing the same hackers that the university celebrated. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across... and how to run from the authorities.

The recent Wright Flyer hack - the same one that gave the university much positive publicity - resulted in severe consequences: the students have a mark against their permanent record, and were fined $50. They were about to change the fine for being caught on the roof to a maximum of $500, but the students succesfully petitioned to change that to 10 hours of community service - because students said that if there was a possible $500 fine, hackers would be more willing to run and seriously injure themselves than risk getting caught by the police.

Of course MIT has the legal responsibility if someone falls from a roof, but there ought to be a way to cover that without punishing the same hackers that the university celebrated. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across... and how to run from the authorities.

The recent Wright Flyer hack - the same one that gave the university much positive publicity - resulted in severe consequences: the students have a mark against their permanent record, and were fined $50. They were about to change the fine for being caught on the roof to a maximum of $500, but the students succesfully petitioned to change that to 10 hours of community service - because students said that if there was a possible $500 fine, hackers would be more willing to run and seriously injure themselves than risk getting caught by the police.

Of course MIT has the legal responsibility if someone falls from a roof, but there ought to be a way to cover that without punishing the same hackers that the university celebrated. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I think DARPA will be better off looking into the cooling systems and making things smaller rather than helping us carry bigger and more...

I think DARPA will be better off looking into the cooling systems and making things smaller rather than helping us carry bigger and more...

There's no reason to be frightened. The Wikipedia section you quoted does not address it. On the other hand, many easily found university style guides do address it. There are more. Feel free to browse.

We *are* the I.D. now

I think one of the biggest challenges isn't in synthesizing strings of DNA, per se - it's in knowing what DNA to synthesize. The real holy grail of synthetic biology is to engineer genetic functions to accomplish a particular goal - design to spec. From the average /. POV, this means "programming" genes in some high-level language (C++ DNA lib, anyone?). Take a look at The Registry of Standard Biological Parts for a first library of genetic "functions".

As I understand it, the current state-of-the-art in terms of programming DNA is basic logic gates that still tend to lose coherence when connected together. Once this is accomplished (best guess, 3-4 years from now to work out the basic science), all of the sophisticated tools and techniques developed by the IT community over the last decade(s) can be rapidly applied, and that goal of design/build to spec will become possible.

Oh yeah right, next thing you know, you'll be telling us all that tinfoil hats don't work.

Exam 1 - nice tables for each student...hmmmm
Exam 2 - bring table cloth and candles for relaxing atmosphere. Prof (http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/users/gjs/gjs.html) walks by and asks "Where's your martini?"
Exam 3 - ok then, same setup but this time cocktail shaker full of vodka/vermouth and two martini glasses.

The good old days of MIT when you could be 18 and drink responsibly.....

Are you insane?

let's review...

the 'cold hard truth' is the EU woke up this morning and said (collectively, in a booming cartoon-villain French-accented voice), "we need to destroy the uncultured Americans! Let's pretend that Microsoft failed to comply with a ruling *that it hasn't successfully challenged* and just fine them, oh, some silly amount per day, to DESTROY the AMERICAN ECONOMY! MUAHAHAHAH! All hail the tinfoil hat.

Oh, wait. i see. You're one of those guys who thinks "the assets of the incalcuably wealthy" == "the economy," and while Bush continues his only successful war - the one on the working poor of this country - your moral outrage and proclamations of doom stem from someone asking the most wealthy among us to (gasp!) follow the ^&%$*(#?!!ing rules.

Moreover, your childish and inaccurate sniping at the Linux community "playing ball in a windows world" is ... fascinating. Are you talking about servers? Are you kidding?

And anyway, this is aimed at groupware integration, primarily... what the hell's that got to do with your implied "nyah nyah Linux has to cheat to compete with Windows which pwnz0rs lololol!" This isn't about "the general class of all things that got served," such as yourself.

Well, never mind. I think we both know the chances of either of us arguing the other 'round to a different point of view, and tinfoil hats amplify Gummint signals anyway.

the concept of "left" can be lost

It's different to what you are talking about, but still interesting that the concept of left and right is not at all universal. Shoot me as I have lost the reference, but I once read a study hinting that cultures who do not see themselves as separate from the world they live in (as do, e.g., the western cultures after the Renessaince, see the development of perspective in painting), seem to experience their body embedded in the world, too. The study showed that Aborigines that lived traditional lives experienced their body as not having a left/right/front/back side, but west/east/north/south, consequently being embedded in an absolute system at all times, and obviously changing with movement. South American indians living in mounainuous areas were said to have the concept of their bodies having uphill and downhill sides instead of left/right.
The study of course had many more details, but it's been a long time.

Other extremely interesting aspects of the brain are explored in Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin, Professor Emeritus of Neurology at the University of Colorado.
E.g., he describes a case where a patient with a certain damage in the cerebrum experienced himself as blind: he could not consciously experience the world with the visual sense. However, if you unexpectedly hurled an object towards the patient's face, he would dodge, as visual stimuli still reached the cerebellum and triggered reaction.

Minsky sheds some light on this topic in his book The Emotion Machine, which is supposed to be published in January sometime if I recall. A draft is on his website, http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/

http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/lectures/10_Archimede sResult.html

With the proliferation of new wifi tech like wi-max combined with the $100 laptops ability to create a seemless mesh network, and maturing peer to peer, will the point to point nature of the ISPs even be relivent any more. I know whenever the first $100 laptops go on sale (for $200) I plan on buying 2 or 3 for myslef and family, maybe even a couple more for close friends. I already have 3 computers just sitting around my room collecting dust that could be used for servers/routers/proxies whatever. Anyone know a good book on getting started with linux?

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

Now I 'get it'. Good stuff.

http://hacks.mit.edu/

Beg all you want, the hack is unimpressive even with the hanging pipe.

Check out the best of gallery: http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/best_of.html

Construction paper on the wall. Speed runs on a tv screen. This is definitely not an "A Squad" MIT hack.

See more and better here: http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/

This is awesome, I accidentally produced something that I suspect is very similar to this no more than 8 months ago using DNA to self-assemble gold nanoparticles. The pictures are gorgeous (but inconclusive, unfortunately). http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/bn-triangles-1.jpg http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/bn-triangles-2.jpg Sorry, I have no particular desire to register an account here for my very rare posts. And Kuna, don't laugh. I promise, I'm not a total dork. But DNA self assembly is still cool.

This is awesome, I accidentally produced something that I suspect is very similar to this no more than 8 months ago using DNA to self-assemble gold nanoparticles. The pictures are gorgeous (but inconclusive, unfortunately). http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/bn-triangles-1.jpg http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/bn-triangles-2.jpg Sorry, I have no particular desire to register an account here for my very rare posts. And Kuna, don't laugh. I promise, I'm not a total dork. But DNA self assembly is still cool.

I'm sort of splitting hairs here, but only the command link is secured on most NASA satellites. The telemetry back to the ground isn't necessarily encrypted (it isn't on the shuttle and ISS), although you'd definitely need to have some pretty expensive equipment and know-how to decode the carrier into anything useful (like voice and data). Then again, it's only fun because it's hard...

There's a few more details on how it works for ISS in a NASA training manual here. (It's a 6 Mb pdf, communications is section 4).

"I can only urge you to read a book like Inside Windows 95."

I've read that exact book. But it has been a while for me too :-)

"Windows 95 had 4 "essential" design requirements. It had to run DOS software (including drivers). It had to run Win16 software (including drivers). It had to run Win32 software (obviously) and it had to do for first two no slower than DOS and/or Windows 3.11 would on a 386 with 4M of RAM."

Windows 95 _did_ do virtualization for DOS apps. Windows 3.1 did too; that's why you could run more than one of them on those systems. It didn't work for all apps since DOS apps expected to be able to do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted with the hardware, and for the cases where it didn't Windows 95 simply shut down and loaded DOS to run the app. Nothing of Windows 95 was left in memory except a little hook to restart Windows when the app finished. It also had a separate shared address space for Win16 apps, which is the same way Windows NT and WINE deal with those apps.

As far as performance requirements, look at this website: [http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/os2/faq/os2faq 0201.html%5D. OS/2 only required a 386 and 4 MB of RAM, yet it was able to run Win16 and DOS apps as well.

"Firstly, I think you'll find the thunking only happened for Win16 apps (although it's been a very long time since I read Inside Windows 95, so I could be remembering wrong. Secondly, this 16/32 bit hybridiations was the sacrifice that had to be made for backwards compatibility. That's why anyone - particularly business customers - who *didn't* have any need for the additional legacy support Windows 9x offered, should have been running Windows NT. There was no reason whatsoever to run WIndows 95 if you didn't need it for DOS or Win16 support."

I'm fairly certain I remember reading in there that Windows 95 DID have part of its kernel implemented in 16-bit code, so while some Win16 calls mapped to Win32, other Win32 calls mapped to Win16. _That's_ where I'm saying MS was lazy. The Win16 programs had to be able to bring each other down; there was no way around it since they expected a shared address space. But there was no reason for Win32 programs to be calling into the quagmire through Win16Mutex(). They could have written the whole kernel as Win32 and provided the Win16 API as just thunks to 32-bit calls. That way Win32 programs would have no contact with Win16, and Win16 programs couldn't cause problems except among themselves.

Nope, that doesn't work either.

I can't believe you fell for that crap. The comments made were nothing like you make them out to be. Paul Martin is just playing off resentment/hatred toward America by playing up his level of independence. Wilkins is right either way, bashing another country is no way to win an election. What if we chose our Presidents by who hated Canada more? You'd like that?

I think the softwood stuff is BS. It's worse than the steel tariffs Bush put on knowing full well they were illegal. And then when Bush was forced to remove them, he justified illegal tariffs by saying "they gave our steel industry time to recover". But I don't see how we owe you the money. The money was collected wrongly from Americans. I don't see how it is thus owed to Canadians.

Did I light into you over illegal rebates/bribes? Did I respond to your comments that we have no freedom of speech by mentioning that your government can dictate which stories the media cannot cover? That the government was confiscating newspapers at the border because of the Homolka stories?

Your house isn't clean. Thus, it would be both polite and prudent for you to be more civil and not make silly statements like government prying and restrictions on freedom are "The American Way".