Slashdot Mirror

We already have something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. See:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumb er=1300793
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/medical-vision/ surgery/tms.html -- most relevant to discussion, has section on visual signal injection
http://www.biomag.hus.fi/tms/
http://www.mp.uni-tuebingen.de/mp/index.php?id=94
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic _stimulation
http://pni.unibe.ch/TMS.htm

...just don't get the idea of a "spoof" sometimes.. I highly doubt Webber, Elton John or Williams played an active role, but apparently Lucas and Anthony Daniels have already seen bits of the performance. By the way, everything is sold out except for Wednesday at 8pm.

they did it a few years ago, and again this past summer at a Star Wars convention. i saw it on MIT campus, and it was amazing. this time they are combining the original three films into a roughly three hour production.

here's a link to the group that is putting it on: http://web.mit.edu/mtg/www/

See also The MIT Tech's review of the 2003 staging of this musical.

One thing the Tech review doesn't mention is Darth Vader in heels. (No, not those kinds of heels. But, boy, I was all excited for a minute when the costumer mentioned that detail.)

Right, it's all adapted. See http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/starwars-lyrics -1109.html for a couple sample lyrics.

It's 3 hours. They did episode 4 (Han shot first, probably 90 minutes long)
a few years ago: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N1/star_wars.1a.html

I was watching a presentation by MIT Lincoln Labs because I was considering doing a co-op with them. Aparently they detect NEA's. http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/
Aparently there are 1622 objects that need to be towed.

>> Go to France, cocksucking piece of shit.

You do know the "war of independence" involved a little French help don't you?

Well, some of them end up becoming pretty awesome people.

I've been interested in Applied Math for some time, and have completed some courses at the local JC as a refresher to my BSCS. Attending Graduate School is very appealing, but I'm interested in math, Computational Science. Although I have an understanding employer, and family, there's no way I could attend traditional classes. I don't see why a math degree couldn't be done online, and there is one through Texas A&M University , but it's not exactly what I'm interested in. MIT has very nice OpenCourseware MIT OpenCourseWare | OCW Home, but it's not a degree granting program. Maybe some /.ers might know of others.

1995: Unisys does not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications

1999: In all cases, a written license agreement or statement signed by an authorized Unisys representative is required from Unisys for all use, sale or distribution of any software (including so-called "freeware") and/or hardware providing LZW conversion capability.

2002: We Have the Way Out: UNIX sucks!

2005: Linux Rulez!

While it is unsurprising that someone who thinks "intelligent design" is a relevant criticism of real science also thinks the Big Bang is "just a theory" (said as if it had been merely dreamt up by a drunk on his way home from the bar last night), it is a huge HUGE tipoff to nuttery when a supposed astrophysicst rejects one of the most successful theories ever devised in all of cosmology. And when respected UCLA physicists start pointing out the glaringly obvious mistakes in said anti-big bang theories, well, that's pretty much when the house of cards comes tumbling down isn't it? No your comment is not insigtful in the least. Rather, it is an appeal to ignorance. Though if you realy do require a specific refutation of this focus fusion bullshit (and that's what it is so why mince words) you need only look to this 1995 doctoral thesis by Todd Rider which effectively kills off any possiblity of nonequilibrium fusion reactions (such as Fusors and pyroelectric fusion devieces) of ever producing net energy. The Focus Fusion device even if it actually DID achieve the temperatures claimed (and no, it does not) would belong to this class of non-starters.

MIT is doing this for a number of classes.

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

This is the page for the MIT Open Courseware initiative, which is aimed at creating high quality, free college courses.

Very cool.

Judging by the quality of my classroom experience at USC, I'd say brick and mortal isn't worth the intuitive prestige it still garners. After watching the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures, some schools seem enlightening, but mine wasn't. Only now as I read more and gain more practical experience am I realizing how truly weak my education in both theory and practice were. If you want a quality education, you have the resources to give yourself that... they're inside your own head. But, on the other hand, if you want a piece of paper worth more on the perception-scale, I still say that a real experience at a real school probably wins. And now I work for my old university's satellite research institution, where I really am learning more than I ever could on my own. In short, my conclusion is this: Undergraduate curriculum is BS... the true advantages of a university aren't in its classrooms. If you don't find your way to where the real learning is occuring, I don't think it's worth that much. If you're not learning from someone who wrote the textbook from which you are learning, why not cut out the middleman?

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html Not like they count toward anything, but they're there.

MIT is an interesting institution. People think it does everything from low level compiler optimizations, to multi-terrabyte optical network multiplexing, and accelerated particle small galaxy creation. And some of that is certainly true. But everyone I know at MIT is working on things like displays that track your eyes and project the correct image onto your cornea to create 3D. Or social networking software that has pervasive independent intelligence to optimize a person's life. Or carbonated ice cream.

Ultimately, MIT leaves normal computer science programs to do their "we make code faster" thing, and creating amazingly technical feats of oddly comprehensible geekery. Some friends are trying to create the worlds highest-bandwidth network by catapulting a ball full of terrabyte network drives over the Charles River from BU to MIT. Others have used their time in the MIT media lab to synthesize and create music generation programs. There is even a full lego lab.

MIT is just perfect if you need a story right away. Just look at some of what they do. Sure, some of it is hardcore geekery, but basically all of it is accessable. It is a bottomless fountain of weird, original ideas that make people think about things in different ways. UCSD has a nice computer program, but the volume of MIT stories is proportional to the volume of weird, interesting stuff the school generates.

UCI, my alma matter, has a good Comp Sci program too. But in my 5 (Ok, ok. 5 and 1/2) years there, I never once saw a wearable computing fashion show, let alone one that contained self-inflating clothing, mood rings that exchanged genetic material with other people's mood rings, jackets that were happy when touched, etc. And MIT has enough material to do odd, amazing stuff like this every week.

And yes, they're buried in work the whole time. Don't expect to see your MIT friends very often. But what they do is more often than not quite fun and easy to write stories about.

Oh, and it is convieniently next to Harvard. And the W3C is there. And it is next to Harvard. And Noam Chomsky, Tim Berners-Lee, Edward Lorenz, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Stallman are there, amongst other great interview sources. Did I mention Harvard?

Fundamental limitations on plasma fusion systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium.

Keep fucking dreaming kids.

Here is a link to the actual project It's interesting. I messed around with it a little today. I don't know if or what people outside MIT can see on it though.

Here is the iSpots (MIT's WiFi mapping and tracking) home page @ MIT with great pictures and more information

http://ispots.mit.edu/

Enjoy!

Here is the link to the MIT site

Technology is not the answer to every problem.

Sure it is, you just have to frame the question differently. e.g.:

Problem: "Our school doesn't have a roof over it!"
Answer: "You should have a fundraiser to buy roofing construction supplies and some alumni to volunteer labor"
Results: New roof for the school, community strengthening, cost of roof spread out among the entire community via the fundraiser.

Whatever. That might be cost effective, sustainable and useful. Really, you should say:

Problem: "Our school doesn't have a roof, we need CAD software, new computers and a trained IT specialist to help us design one!"
Answer: "Let us give your education ministry a loan from the IMF or DevBank to pursue a CAD-in-Schools project, delivering top-of-the-line CAD-capable desktop computers with the latest non-F/LOSS software on it, spending millions of loan-dollars that we'll have to repay later."
Results: New computers in every school which get ruined as they got delivered during the rainy season to schools with no roof.

But seriously. The problem of course is Negroponte can create buzz with a $100 laptop-for-every-child program, whereas "put a roof on every rural school" just doesn't quite get the same level of interest from most folk, despite the fact that the cost would be lower and benefits per cost much higher. Try arguing that for the value of ventilated pit latrines (or, gasp, running water) -- people blink at you, because they don't get the fact that that is a need for many schools in the developing world. Cheap computers, they grok.

This is not in defense, just explanation and frustration from my own experience.

Basically, I agree -- If you're gonna pony up $100US/child, lemme suggest, oh, maybe, a billion better projects you can direct that towards.

On the other hand, if you've got some of the basics, not having basic computing skills can be a real barrier in getting a good job. Current solutions (that I've seen enacted in programs!) are keyboards with a tiny lcd screen and palmOS for $200+, so a fully functional laptop with some made-for-3rd-world ruggedizing, solar/handcrank power, etc. concepts built in is a potentially valuable idea.

I find it interesting, however, that (according to http://laptop.media.mit.edu/):
"Please note that the $100 laptops--not yet in production--will not be available for sale. The laptops will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives. "

I for one would pay twice the price to get a ruggedized, hand-crankable, low-end, paperback-book-sized laptop. I smell something funny, economically speaking, going on here. Either the hardware cost will be at a loss and there's service/support/gov't contracting fees to balance it, or something else funny. I'd imagine the demand for these in the developed world would be reasonably high, so by doing this he's killing his profits that he could use to improve the design for the developing world...

Most cell phones are not really sub-$100 devices. Their true cost of a web-enabled phone is often well over $100, but the true cost is hidden somewhere in the 1 to 2 year contract with the provider.

Well, this isn't a sub-$100 device, either, really.

The $100 price point for this device is based on unrealistic volume assumptions, in my opinion -- Ethan notes that it'll likely start off at $130 to $150 'not including any distribution costs, marketing, or any digital content that comes pre-installed on the box' assuming 5 countries sign up for a million laptops each.

IMO those are pretty optimistic prices. Having worked on a low-cost laptop-like device in the past, in our experience we found that the normal fluctuations of the component market can cause the price point to swing wildly.

Having said that, I wish them luck! Being Irish, I can tell you that adoption of high tech really can bring major benefits to a society...

BTW the worldchanging link seems slashdotted -- try Ethan's weblog post here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=241 . (and subscribe to his weblog while you're at it -- he regularly posts excellent insights into the meeting point of tech and the developing world. strongly recommended.)

Hell, here's the weblog post to mirror it...

'I took a day off from this years Pop!Tech conference to hang out with some friends in Portland. But before driving from Camden to Portland, I dropped into the Opera House to check email and bumped into Nicholas Negroponte, whod given a talk the day before on his work to produce a laptop that costs less than a hundred dollars.

Negroponte was an advisor to Geekcorps and was extremely helpful to me as we figured out whether the organization would be supported by corporate sponsorship, foundations or government largesse. So he knows about my long-standing interest in technology in the developing world. He asked whether I was interested in coming over to the lab and seeing a demo of the machine, and talking about strategies for deployment.

Hell yeah.

The demo was yesterday afternoon, and while it didnt include a functioning prototype, I learned a great deal more about machine than I have from previous articles, or Negropontes talk at Pop!Tech. He was able to answer a whole set of questions for me, and raise an entire set of new ones, which, I suspect, will take a number of years to answer accurately.

First, the name. Id been calling the project the sub-hundred dollar laptop the acronym of which is the unfortunate SHiL. Negropontes now calling the project OLPC - One Laptop Per Child. It does a better job of defining the project, I think - not taking the bottom out of the consumer laptop market, but providing a learning tool for students around the world.

On to the machine. While the actual prototype is being actively banged on (in preparation for a live, but tethered, demo at WSIS on November 16th), Negroponte keeps a cardboard mockup of the machine on the conference table in his office. Its a clever little thing - I had a hard time putting it down after picking it up. You can see a design close to the prototype I saw on the front page of Design Continuums site - theyre evidently doing the case design for the machine and, actually, pretty far from the design reported on in the AP story about the project.

The mockup I saw was about the size of a large paperback book. Theres a stiff rubber gasket around the edge of the machine, which can double as a stand. The keyboard on the

Most cell phones are not really sub-$100 devices. Their true cost of a web-enabled phone is often well over $100, but the true cost is hidden somewhere in the 1 to 2 year contract with the provider.

Well, this isn't a sub-$100 device, either, really.

The $100 price point for this device is based on unrealistic volume assumptions, in my opinion -- Ethan notes that it'll likely start off at $130 to $150 'not including any distribution costs, marketing, or any digital content that comes pre-installed on the box' assuming 5 countries sign up for a million laptops each.

IMO those are pretty optimistic prices. Having worked on a low-cost laptop-like device in the past, in our experience we found that the normal fluctuations of the component market can cause the price point to swing wildly.

Having said that, I wish them luck! Being Irish, I can tell you that adoption of high tech really can bring major benefits to a society...

BTW the worldchanging link seems slashdotted -- try Ethan's weblog post here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=241 . (and subscribe to his weblog while you're at it -- he regularly posts excellent insights into the meeting point of tech and the developing world. strongly recommended.)

Hell, here's the weblog post to mirror it...

'I took a day off from this years Pop!Tech conference to hang out with some friends in Portland. But before driving from Camden to Portland, I dropped into the Opera House to check email and bumped into Nicholas Negroponte, whod given a talk the day before on his work to produce a laptop that costs less than a hundred dollars.

Negroponte was an advisor to Geekcorps and was extremely helpful to me as we figured out whether the organization would be supported by corporate sponsorship, foundations or government largesse. So he knows about my long-standing interest in technology in the developing world. He asked whether I was interested in coming over to the lab and seeing a demo of the machine, and talking about strategies for deployment.

Hell yeah.

The demo was yesterday afternoon, and while it didnt include a functioning prototype, I learned a great deal more about machine than I have from previous articles, or Negropontes talk at Pop!Tech. He was able to answer a whole set of questions for me, and raise an entire set of new ones, which, I suspect, will take a number of years to answer accurately.

First, the name. Id been calling the project the sub-hundred dollar laptop the acronym of which is the unfortunate SHiL. Negropontes now calling the project OLPC - One Laptop Per Child. It does a better job of defining the project, I think - not taking the bottom out of the consumer laptop market, but providing a learning tool for students around the world.

On to the machine. While the actual prototype is being actively banged on (in preparation for a live, but tethered, demo at WSIS on November 16th), Negroponte keeps a cardboard mockup of the machine on the conference table in his office. Its a clever little thing - I had a hard time putting it down after picking it up. You can see a design close to the prototype I saw on the front page of Design Continuums site - theyre evidently doing the case design for the machine and, actually, pretty far from the design reported on in the AP story about the project.

The mockup I saw was about the size of a large paperback book. Theres a stiff rubber gasket around the edge of the machine, which can double as a stand. The keyboard on the

Most cell phones are not really sub-$100 devices. Their true cost of a web-enabled phone is often well over $100, but the true cost is hidden somewhere in the 1 to 2 year contract with the provider.

Well, this isn't a sub-$100 device, either, really.

The $100 price point for this device is based on unrealistic volume assumptions, in my opinion -- Ethan notes that it'll likely start off at $130 to $150 'not including any distribution costs, marketing, or any digital content that comes pre-installed on the box' assuming 5 countries sign up for a million laptops each.

IMO those are pretty optimistic prices. Having worked on a low-cost laptop-like device in the past, in our experience we found that the normal fluctuations of the component market can cause the price point to swing wildly.

Having said that, I wish them luck! Being Irish, I can tell you that adoption of high tech really can bring major benefits to a society...

BTW the worldchanging link seems slashdotted -- try Ethan's weblog post here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=241 . (and subscribe to his weblog while you're at it -- he regularly posts excellent insights into the meeting point of tech and the developing world. strongly recommended.)

Hell, here's the weblog post to mirror it...

'I took a day off from this years Pop!Tech conference to hang out with some friends in Portland. But before driving from Camden to Portland, I dropped into the Opera House to check email and bumped into Nicholas Negroponte, whod given a talk the day before on his work to produce a laptop that costs less than a hundred dollars.

Negroponte was an advisor to Geekcorps and was extremely helpful to me as we figured out whether the organization would be supported by corporate sponsorship, foundations or government largesse. So he knows about my long-standing interest in technology in the developing world. He asked whether I was interested in coming over to the lab and seeing a demo of the machine, and talking about strategies for deployment.

Hell yeah.

The demo was yesterday afternoon, and while it didnt include a functioning prototype, I learned a great deal more about machine than I have from previous articles, or Negropontes talk at Pop!Tech. He was able to answer a whole set of questions for me, and raise an entire set of new ones, which, I suspect, will take a number of years to answer accurately.

First, the name. Id been calling the project the sub-hundred dollar laptop the acronym of which is the unfortunate SHiL. Negropontes now calling the project OLPC - One Laptop Per Child. It does a better job of defining the project, I think - not taking the bottom out of the consumer laptop market, but providing a learning tool for students around the world.

On to the machine. While the actual prototype is being actively banged on (in preparation for a live, but tethered, demo at WSIS on November 16th), Negroponte keeps a cardboard mockup of the machine on the conference table in his office. Its a clever little thing - I had a hard time putting it down after picking it up. You can see a design close to the prototype I saw on the front page of Design Continuums site - theyre evidently doing the case design for the machine and, actually, pretty far from the design reported on in the AP story about the project.

The mockup I saw was about the size of a large paperback book. Theres a stiff rubber gasket around the edge of the machine, which can double as a stand. The keyboard on the

Besides, as the blurb says, they can't be read unless the passport is open. So long as you keep it shut they can't read it at all.

Do you really believe that?

Also it's worth noting that, first, HotOS isn't "invite only." That's why there is a call for papers on the web site referenced by the grandparent. Second, the review is double blind, so there's no chance of papers submitted by Microsoft Research getting special treatment by the reviewers. So I'm not really sure what the grandparent is alluding to.

MSR isn't the first research group to think of using new language constructs to enforce security. Check out this paper on Asbestos, appearing at SOSP, for something similar. But one thing is certain: MSR has a large pool of talent and the money to push this research endeavor farther than any other company or academic institution could, and that is something exciting.

- shadowmatter

[Walmart] will do well no matter how poor their customers become because they sell very cheaply. I never said they wouldn't be able to adapt to a richer consumer, what I said was that it's convenient for them for the poor to remain poor

My point was that if e.g. a big new resource opens up which allows lower prices, companies that doesn't use that resource will die. That is the reason competition works. No reason to blame the companies better at using the resource.

transferring well-paid jobs to sweatshops benefits neither us, who lose our disposable income, or the sweatshop workers who are exploited due to their desperation.
...
I also fail to see anything any less right-wing from your 'non-right' economist than I see everyday from the usual short termists that currently set world economic policy. Sweatshop jobs may be better than no jobs, but they certainly don't lead to economic growth

You claim that this is wrong? I am not an economist, but from what else I've read, it seems to be the prevalent opinion in their field.

Can you show that the argument is wrong? Or that it is unusual for economists? It contradicts your position.

Otherwise you are arguing that most economists are idiots or in a conspiracy, which is more or less what the creationists argue about palaentologists.

Specifically how do the HDR engines in modern games work? Internally they render in high-dynamic range? Are they just setting a global gain for each scene based on the maximum and minimum intensities? The game industry seems to throw around a lot of HDR terms without being precise about what they're doing. The computer graphics research community has thorougly studied the task of compressing dynamic range while maintaining the maximum perceived contrast.

To do a decent job at compressing dynamic range and maintaining local contrast, you need a non-global operator (a non-spatially uniform intensity adjustment). This has been observed since at least 1972 (STOCKHAM, T. 1972. Image processing in the context of a visual model. Proc. IEEE 60, 828-842.). But these operations typically aren't suited for real time rendering.

I watched the half life 2 HDR demo and it was the least impressive thing I'd ever seen. I honestly couldn't tell which side of the screen (hdr versus normal) looked better. I guessed that they were simply doing some global gain adjustment on each frame, like auto-gain on a video camera.

It's not clear video games should be internally rendering to very high dynamic range, since they will have to range compress that down to a common display device. If they're only trying to get halo's around light sources there is probably a more direct way to do so. A proper, non-uniform, non-linear tone-map operator is pretty expensive. I guess some simple ones might be feasible with todays pixel shaders, but they'd probably have artifacts. Check out http://web.mit.edu/yzli/www/hdr05.pdf for a good, recent SIGGRAPH paper on dynamic range compression.

to summarize- getting HDR images or renderings is very easy. Getting them onto a normal display device with maximum perceived quality and contrast is hard.

You need to motivate why Walmart would fail to sell a different product mix to target a bit richer audience? It is what retail businesses do.

I am not an economist, but I can tell you that if there shows up a gigantic new seller of very low cost resource used for production (work time), it will be a turbulent market for buying that resource for a while!

Companies compete with other companies that buy the cheaper resource (workers in China/India). If one company doesn't optimize enough, it will die. That is why capitalism is effective; constructive destruction.

In the end, it will drive up salaries in the whole world, and make it a better place for the poor countries. Unless it gets too unstable and we get an economic crash.

This is from a non-right economist.

I am currently taking a great course on the Introduction of Linguistists. I have been exposed to the rather complex process a human being uses to make a sound (phoneme). You can go here to get a good idea of what it truly entails http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosop hy/24-900Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm The main obstacles to this is the fact each langauge uses different places and manners of articulation as well as the fact that intonation can change the meaning of a word. In Mandarin the word ma can change meaning based on tone. This is not a factor in English but certainly is for most Asian languages. The ability to use phonemes is one thing but paralinguistics is another (sarcasm).

This is great, now that HostAP and Centrino are in the kernel. We've needed this to be in the mainstream kernel for some time. But Atheros support is still missing, and it's just as important, if not more important, than either of those chipsets. Most people are aware of the MadWifi drivers with closed-source HAL (i.e. part of the driver is closed source), but there's also a project by OpenBSD to make a completely open source driver for the Atheros cards, called OpenHAL. It's been ported to linux: http://cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu/cvs/roofnet/release/ openhal/ - but needs testing. Please work on it!

http://images.google.com/images?q=Luk%20Van%20Pari js&sourceid=mozilla-search&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&sa=N& tab=wi
http://csbi.mit.edu/news/archive/2003/February/200 30226000000/story.pdf
ask and ye shall receive.

You mean like this? To sum up the case quickly, this is a tool for the automatic creation of fake but real-looking "science papers" (ironically enough, developed at the MIT), and one such paper ("A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy") was submitted to the 2005 World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, and actually accepted. At that point, of course, the authors of the tool wrote about it, the story hit Slashdot, and the organisers of the conference were quick to retract their acceptance...

Still, I think it goes to show that if someone is actively trying to dishonest in the scientific community, it's not hard to get past the safeguards. Fabricating data is something that is (I guess) comparatively hard to detect, compared to an entire document that was written without any human intervention and thus shouldn't really make any kind of sense at all, but even the fake document wasn't detected. It sure makes you wonder how many people fabricating data are actually not caught and instead get away with it.

I know I do. I think Smullyan puts it best:

"Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could 'determine' your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same."

Without much effort on your part you could grab DrScheme (its packaged as part of some Linux distros, otherwise go to here. That's your graphical coding environment. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

For material to accompany it, "How to Design Programs" is a good book available online in its entirety here.

If you're more hardcore, then you might prefer "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", another book online here. SICP also has about 20 hour-long downloadable lecture videos, but be prepared for 70/80s fashions in the audience...

I think HTDP is a great way to learn to program in general, and DrScheme is a good environment in which to learn.

Downsides: scheme isn't widely used outside of education. It is also not obviously closely related to mainstream languages (C++/Java/C#/Perl/Python/Ruby) in appearance.

Upsides: scheme is fairly easy to learn, so you can focus on picking up concepts and discovering if you enjoy programming. Scheme is a also a very close relative to lisp, which is a (slightly :-) more pragmatic language to learn to deploy applications in.

The parent is somewhat correct. The key IS to start programming, but under guidance. I strongly recommend that the original poster start with Scheme, and work his/her way through the exercises in the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman. If you are interested in the *principles* of programming, this is by an order of magnitude the best book. If you don't find this book fun, you will not like programming. The full text is available for free at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z -H-1.html#titlepage

Yes, Scheme is completely useless in terms of employment, but there is almost no syntax to use, meaning one can concentrate on principles.

Sounds like good questions. I would point out, when you answer them, that the other methods you have above are not mutually exclusive. Biodiesel can only be expanded as far as the biomass producing farmland will go. A backup is needed, be it some form of battery or reserve generation capacity in the instances of a cloudy day.

WARNING: Linked PDF
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/Economics.pdf
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/fuelfactsheets
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biodiese l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_fuel

The battery is the real kicker. I've wanted to see for some time where the grid was only tapped for part of the energy needed for a home (or car, given Honda's home refueling idea) where the rest came from built in power generation and utilization ability. But without a battery solution to store excess energy, the grid must be overbuilt to handle a day when little ambient energy is available and more energy is required from remote generation.

Put available farmland to use generating biomass for Biodiesel and Ethanol, put solar panels on roofs and solar windows in standard. Converting good, arable farmland into fields full of solar panels ... well, I'll have to keep looking for numbers that would support that decision.

Some valid question raised. Let me add (or clarify) some more. What types of waste? Is the waste of a greater volume than the waste we dump into the air by continuing to use coal for power generation? How does France deal with its nuclear waste (they have an extensive program)? What exactly is the lifespan for a pebble-bed reactor?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrification
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html

Some answers in these links, but not all of the answers. And the opinions you form will be your own, not mine.

Here's some fantastic diagrams that describe the history of telecom. See pages 9 through 12 on this powerpoint slide from MIT. The AT&T breakup made things kind of complicated, the 1996 Telecom Act made them even more complicated, but has allowed everything to go back to a pre-breakup configuration.

White papers and flashy websites (when they're working - Data Mobility Group) are all very well, but if you want to read a real journal article on the subject, Andrew McAfee (an Associate Professor at Harvard) recently had one such in the MIT Sloan Management Review : 'Will Web Services Really Change Collaboration' (though like a real journal article, it's not free and doesn't have Flash adverts and videos in the middle).

Despite being a libertarian, I've been brainwashed almost thoroughly by slashdot into a bias against Microsoft. So, I was surprised that www.ocw.mit.edu is published using Microsoft software: this from their FAQ, at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/OCWHelp/help.htm# 25 "30. What technology is used to publish the MIT OCW Web site? The MIT OCW technology solution supports a complex publishing process. This is a large-scale digital publishing infrastructure that consists of planning tools, a content management system (CMS), and the MIT OCW content distribution infrastructure. The current technical solution has been in use since April 2003 with a four-person technical support team managing all aspects of this infrastructure. The planning tools used by the MIT OCW team to assist faculty in publishing their course materials include a custom application of FileMaker Pro, and several checklists and documents. For creating and managing content, we use several desktop tools (file conversion tools) as well as the CMS, an extensively customized version of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 that fully supports our publishing process. Our content delivery infrastructure includes a sophisticated publishing engine, content staging server, and a content delivery network utilizing Akamai's EdgeSuite platform."

No, it's a Good Thing. Do you honestly think the cost would have been
significantly less had they engineered as you wished? As opposed to
the assuredly higher costs had they intentionally diesgned something
to last a long time.

Besides the general repulsiveness of disposable production, good
engineering tends to last, period. Consider Building 20,
which would have lasted even longer had it been maintained a little.

But hey, enjoy your single view DVDs and planned obsolence consumer
goods with engineered failures.

Most anyone (here (I'd hope)) can build a working galvanic vestibulator in their home for under $5. It's just a 0.1hz~70hz squarewave sinking ~20 milliamps of current through your neck. You can easily do that with a 555 in astable mode (R1=2kOhm,R2=26kOhm,C=.1uF--it'll have a frequency of about 27hz and a duty cycle near %50), a 9v battery or two, some pennies, cotton, and a bit of saltwater. Place the ghetto electrodes beind your ears. Play with the frequency in the above range by using knob potentiometers. I've found ~15-30hz to be best.

Even more fun can be had with a cheap Atmel ATtiny2313 8bit microcontroller (or PIC if you're that type). They cost about ~$2 each but you can sample them from large manufacturers for free (I've sampled 9 ATtiny2313 for free now). They can be programmed right from the serial port in simple (you can ignore the LEDs, but hey leave them in and you have a persistance of vision toy too), or slightly less simple manners.

If you just want to test the effect out then just the 9vs, a few pennies, some cotton, salt water, and a little wire will do. Simply series the batteries and make electrodes out of the materials previously mentioned, warm water works best. Apply the electrodes to your mastoid proccesses and you'll feel the 'acceleration'...and a bit of stinging, but not too bad. (It'd be best if you had a soldering iron, but you could go without if really needed.)

Most anyone (here (I'd hope)) can build a working galvanic vestibulator in their home for under $5. It's just a 0.1hz~70hz squarewave sinking ~20 milliamps of current through your neck. You can easily do that with a 555 in astable mode (R1=2kOhm,R2=26kOhm,C=.1uF--it'll have a frequency of about 27hz and a duty cycle near %50), a 9v battery or two, some pennies, cotton, and a bit of saltwater. Place the ghetto electrodes beind your ears. Play with the frequency in the above range by using knob potentiometers. I've found ~15-30hz to be best.

Even more fun can be had with a cheap Atmel ATtiny2313 8bit microcontroller (or PIC if you're that type). They cost about ~$2 each but you can sample them from large manufacturers for free (I've sampled 9 ATtiny2313 for free now). They can be programmed right from the serial port in simple (you can ignore the LEDs, but hey leave them in and you have a persistance of vision toy too), or slightly less simple manners.

If you just want to test the effect out then just the 9vs, a few pennies, some cotton, salt water, and a little wire will do. Simply series the batteries and make electrodes out of the materials previously mentioned, warm water works best. Apply the electrodes to your mastoid proccesses and you'll feel the 'acceleration'...and a bit of stinging, but not too bad. (It'd be best if you had a soldering iron, but you could go without if really needed.)

Research done at MIT shows that tinfoil hats actually amplify government mind control beams. Because they are not fully enclosed, they actually end up acting as a sort of antenna. Yes, that's right: Wearing a tinfoil hat is exactly what the shadow government wants you to do!

I wish I'd seen this a couple days ago so I could post when it was new. Hopefully you'll still see this post.

You've got some good advice as well as some really, really bad or irrelevant advice. Quote from a post above: "You need a compiled language first so the student can begin to understand syntax." This statement is so utterly meaningless it is hilarious.

Here's some things you should know:

1. This industry is dysfunctional. Seriously. Why are so many programmers using C, a language designed over 30 years ago? Or C++ and Java which retain many of the problems with C? There are better technologies out there but people are so stuck in their ways.

2. It does matter what language you use. You will regularly hear people say otherwise. Don't believe them for a second. I don't have the time to go into all of this now, but find out for yourself. Please do not just learn C++ and Java and be stuck in that same rut your whole life. Learn C, C++, Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, OCaml. Not necessarily in that order. In fact, definitely not in that order. But learn each of them and learn them well, and use them to write not-utterly-trivial programs. Each of them will give you some insight in a different way. And if you learn them well I guarantee you you will wonder "Why in the world are people using C or C++ for application-level programs???"

3. Keep your eye on the big picture. Understand the issues. It doesn't really matter that much if you can sit down and bang out a good random number algorithm. If you ever need to implement such a thing you can get it out of a book easily. What does matter is if you understand how to design programs.

4. A big chunk of learning programming for a complete beginner is learning peripheral issues. Learning to use an editor well. Learning to use your compiler or interpreter. Learning to use a build system. Frankly it's appalling that things like build systems are still such an issue. But, some of these (like an editor) are unavoidable. My advice: GNU Emacs. It's definitely not perfect, but it's very good and very capable.

5. Computer science is not about computers. Computers are the tools we use. Computer science is about process. About imperative knowledge, rather than declarative knowledge. Mathematics addresses the question "What is a square root?" Computer science addresses the question "How do you find a square root?"

6. You must read books. When I first started programming (I'm self taught) I thought I could learn everything I needed to know online. Wrong! The information is simply not there. Read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. You can buy it or it is free online here (OK, I guess I'm contradicting myself... it is online. But it's a real book, not just some guy's webpage).

7. Learn to discern who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't (see #1 above). For instance, you will often hear that languages like Scheme are not "practical" or are just plain not useful. This is completely bogus. I use Scheme. It works. Period.

8. Write a lot of code!

Some small American newspapers often compose novelty news stories, to attract people's attention and make money. The New York-based weekly "The Onion" is just such a paper.

According to people working at Capitol, the Onion is a paper which is constantly reporting untrue stories.

Well, there was the Chinese reporter who saw an article in the Onion indicating that the US was moving the capitol and turning it into a theme park complete with rides. He scarfed up the article and had it published, not realizing it was satire. (I guess the joke was on him!) the story is at http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N27/long5_27.27w.html

Get yourself a Scheme interpreter or compiler and watch These Online Lectures from MIT's most famous computer science class

I might suggest buying a copy of the textbook as well. you can definitely get it used.

Journalism really has gone down the mountain if Onion stories are routinely being run as actual news.... Have any linkage to one of these?

I think he's got a case of "it happened once, in a foreign non-english newspaper, so that means that it happens on a regular basis."

If it happens on a regular basis, I'm sure we'd have heard about it.