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With regard to: "You can have an open jar of elemental mercury on your desk beside you, the same kind used in switches and it will do nothing to you."
It depends... Mercury does have a vapor pressure. Go ahead and google it using the terms Mercury and Vapor Pressure. One of the articles I found was on the MIT web site: http://web.mit.edu/cohengroup/.... It is possible to ingest mercury by being exposed to metallic mercury for a long period of time. I don't think a one time exposure due to broken CFL is going to harm you. On the other hand, deliberately exposing yourself to mercury just to show it is harmless makes no sense.

My main problem with this is it's a Google sub-project, and as much as I love their core products, they do have a habit of pulling things as soon as you become dependant on them (reader, AppInventor, and health for three examples I did depend on until they vanished). OK any company can pull a product, but it seems to be a favourite Google pass time.

Fortunately your poor investment in something simply because it cost you nothing doesn't stop others from using the results of projects like this to test their assumptions on the subject - or build upon the knowledge gained from the outcomes.

Google Reader alternatives:-

• Go Read subscription required
• Selffos
• Tiny Tiny RSS

AppInventor alternatives:-

• MIT App Inventor
• iBuild App

"Health" alternatives? WTF do you mean - maybe you could do your own research? Likely it'd take less time and effort than whining because you depended on something free (cost, contribution, and commitment wise).

I remember when the annual Melbourne show meant free show bags full of goodies - there was lollies, and icecreams, and chocolate bars, t-shirts, and hats. Streets Icecreams, Cadbury... all utter bastards. Now I have to pay money for junk food! [mutter, mutter, whine, piss on furniture, whine].

Does that include this?

I think you mis-translated.

MIT and others have been working on self-healing software for decades. For example,

http://people.csail.mit.edu/st...

http://www.livescience.com/589...

What exactly is the advancement here?

You answer that yourself in the very next sentence:

Why would anyone pay for a college education where there were no professors?

Bingo. This is the advancement. You can get a world class education for NOTHING. How is that not an advancement? You only need to attend a physical university if you want 1) a diploma, or 2) to meet girls.

I am currently working through the CS program at MIT Courseware. Every morning, I start up the video, jump on the treadmill, and burn up about 300 calories while I learn something new. I have applied many of the things I learned to my job, and I have also lost about 5 kg. I think it is fantastic that MIT puts this material up for free, and I am glad that CMU is doing the same. I can't see how anyone can think this is not an advancement.

For $200k just hire more teachers.

If you include benefits, overhead, and the amortized cost of the pensions, that would get you two teachers, who on average would be average.

I have taken several MIT Courseware MOOCs, most recently Patrick Winston's AI course. It is better than anything I was taught at the univ I attended. With a MOOC, everyone can see the material presented by the best instructor available. Asking questions in the forum generally gives better and more thorough answers than a rushed professor would give if you interrupted him in class.

If you step back and think about it, mediocre teachers regurgitating the same material over and over is a dumb way to educate people. We can do better.

That can actually work better than one might expect. See this paper: Fan Long, Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos, Martin Rinard, "Automatic Runtime Error Repair and Containment via Recovery Shepherding", PLDI 2014, http://people.csail.mit.edu/st...

Quote from the introduction:

We present a new system, RCV, which enables applications to
recover from divide-by-zero and null-dereference errors, continue
on with their normal execution path, and productively serve the
needs of their users despite the presence of such errors. RCV
replaces the standard divide-by-zero (SIGFPE) and segmentation
violation (SIGSEGV) signal handlers with its own handlers. RCV's
divide-by-zero handler manufactures the default value of zero as
the result of the divide, then returns back to the application to
continue normal execution after the instruction that triggered the
divide-by-zero error.
For writes via an address close to zero, RCVâ(TM)s segmentation
violation handler discards the write. For reads via an address close
to zero, RCVâ(TM)s handler manufactures the default value of zero as
the result of the read. For function calls via a function pointer
close to zero, the handler skips the call (such calls often correspond
to method invocations on a null object). In all cases RCV then
returns back to the application to continue normal execution after
the instruction that triggered the segmentation violation.

The interesting thing is, this keeps running programs longer than you might think, and the results often aren't noticeable in the sense that the program produces the "right" output.

Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.

Umm, yes and no.

Re-read my post less selectively. We now work less hours. Most of our work is for employers (or as employers). Much of our work used to be not for employers. No Macdonalds, pizza, or throw something in the microwave, no washing machines, no instant heat. Except for a privileged few much of life was work from cain'tsee to cain'tsee. Prior to industrialisation we got more sleep, other than that, for most of the world life was a lot more work than it is now for much of the so-called 'developed' world.

The article you referenced would be amongst the poorest pieces of research I've read recently. Pilkington knew little of "ordinary" life other than what he heard, or "observed" while briefly pretending to be a beggar - with servants. He failed to notice plagues and civil wars, and like the good Protestants of the day promoted a caste system where the "workers" were lazy and morality was something that came to them as a result of fear of punishment. His selective and ignorant quotes say nothing of sailors, workhouses, orphanages, tanneries, mines, foundries or laundries. Not surprisingly given the era he didn't comment on indentured labor (slavery for debt) or child labor. Despite all the authors (More, Rabelais, Servetus, Bacon, Machieavelli and many others) of that period you reference one based almost soley on Pilkington! To Pilkington England didn't include Wales, Scotland, or Orkney (and even so far from represents "much of the developed world"). That's the equivalent of viewing the 21st century through the eyes of Jerry Seinfield, or Snoop Dogg.

Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.

Umm, yes and no.

Read the link for details, but basically people for the past thousand years or so -- at least in Europe -- generally worked roughly the same number of hours per year as they do today. The difference was that the work was distributed in different ways -- a lot of work was seasonal (particularly when most people were farmers), which meant you were working 16-hour days most days of the week during harvest, but you basically had little to do during the winter for a few months. And don't forget that work basically had to stop when the sun went down, and poor people couldn't generally afford light sources after dark -- so even if you wanted to work longer hours in the winter, you couldn't.

I'll agree with you that work was harder in the past in terms of manual labor, etc. But the amount of "leisure time" was probably not as much less as you imagine it to be.

We may not be living in a dystopia, but it is certainly true that productivity has skyrocketed per worker over the past couple centuries, but total work time has not decreased significantly. Granted, some of that extra productivity is necessary to go toward modern conveniences -- but we could probably all be working for half or a quarter of the hours we do and still have a reasonably high standard of living. The main difference would be that the rich people wouldn't be skimming such a huge amount off the top.

Funny, yes, but the scientists behind the research, at NASA, do use the term correctly. They do mean chaotic in the mathematical sense. I listened to the streamed press conference on the subject and, if you look beyond the egregious mis-pronouciation of Charon by the lead author on the work, someone who really should know better, they did a pretty good job of establishing a likely chaotic orientation for Hydra and Nix. Not "really messy and hard to predict but deterministic," but chaotic. With an N-body system, it turns out it isn't that hard to establish chaos.

And, of course, we know from simulation work done at MIT that the orbit of Pluto is likely chaotic, as published in Science some years ago: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma... -- I've worked with some of the people who wrote that report, and they are among the best, and most careful scientists I know.

Your point? You only give them your public key - the whole point of which is that it's public. That's why we put them on keyservers. Mostly they will use it for the emails they send you... which they already know the contents of. They'll also be acting as a key distribution channel which is interesting - reliably distributing public keys is difficult and a social network account could act as a verified way to do this (although I wouldn't want to rely on it without being sure they hadn't switched the key out for another one).

A police bullpen or typing pool may be fine in a big open area. The same goes for sales and marketing types. However, if you're talking about any work which requires stretches of concentrated effort then it's just a Bad Idea. Engineers? No. Programmers? No. Accountants? No. Any kind of researcher? No.

Have you ever seen a picture of an engineering/drafting office from say... anywhere between the late 1800's and the mid/late 1980's (when draftsmen started to be replaced by computers and the size of said offices began to shrink dramatically)? Big ass open plan offices - sometimes thousands of square feet of big ass open plan offices. The same goes for accounting departments. One of Frank Lloyd Wright's most celebrated designs (from 1936) had a big ass open plan office as it's centerpiece.
 
We went to the bloody moon in vehicles designed in big ass open plan offices.
 
Somewhere in my book collection, I have a book intended for professional engineers and engineering managers from the 1950's... which devotes three whole chapters to the knotty problem of laying out (invariably open plan) engineering offices and drafting rooms - mapping a 3d object onto a 2d arrangement of desks and drafting tables.
 

This is the only real reason they're pushing this model. It's a clear terminus of the erosion that's led us from offices, to cubicles, to the little half walls, to just acres of desks.

I don't know where this idea came from that "everyone had a private office until Evil Management latched onto the open plan" comes from, but it's complete bull. Private offices have long been the exception, proof that one was senior enough to rate one and to have Made It, not the rule.

What is it actually like using internet with 56k nowadays? I imagine most sites can't be usable.

I don't know about 56k, but thanks to rubbish phone lines I got to experience the internet with 33.6-ish speeds a few years ago.

If you just naively browse without considerations for your bandwidth, it's absolute shit. Once you understand that your connection sucks and nobody designs sites with you in mind, though, you can make adjustments to make it tolerable. In a lot of ways, it's no different than using a niche OS: nobody expects it, nobody plans for it, and you have to put extra time into figuring out workarounds, but once you do it can work.

For example, you can bump up browser cache size so that it doesn't reload images, set up an ad blocker, and set up NoScript, and browsing sites you frequent often becomes tolerable. For random one-off sites, a second browser with image loading disabled is helpful, especially if you can toggle images on/off with a keybind. links2 was actually pretty good for this, despite being horribly ugly.

Another thing that helps is using RSS feeds, especially for sites like this. RSS feeds use a lot less bandwidth and you can skip loading the site at all unless a specific article is interesting. Using IMAP to avoid downloading email messages works well too, but you have to change some settings to reduce bandwidth use.

Also, you can't forget that a downloader like wget or aria2c is your friend. A good downloader does a much better job of handling connection loss and resuming, which is critical for a slow link. Especially if the provider tends to disconnect long-lived links to discourage 24/7 use like mine did. It was easy enough to automate reconnect and download, but directly downloading from browsers was a terrible idea.

You can also get a cheap VPS and use it to work around some problems. Like how sometimes sites are configured with stupidly low timeouts, making it impossible to get files on a slow link. You can ssh into the VPS, download the file quickly there, and then transfer it slowly to yourself. Had problems with git repos that were prone to doing that, for another example. I cloned the repo onto the VPS, then cloned the VPS copy over dialup instead of the master and didn't have to deal with the timeouts any more.

If you're comfortable with command line and ncurses programs, you can get even more use out of the VPS to improve dialup life, too. Input isn't too bad with dialup latency, and using mosh helps mitigate it further. I sometimes did my browsing and mail checking from the VPS, for example, since I actually like elinks and alpine.

Start with How to Design Programs and work it through, from beginning to end, even if you are a good programmer.

Then go to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Work through the chapters that you find interesting.

Then start with learning Common Lisp. Even after 30 years existence, there is still no other programming language which implements everything that is possible with CL. There might be programming languages which are more specialised in certain language subsets that are also part of Common Lisp, but none includes everything that CL includes.

Then learn Common Lisp macros, and realise that to get at the same level of possibilities in other programming languages, you need to embed a Lisp system. But that will be a slow interpreter, and Common Lisp can compile.

Not just that, there are a LOT of efficiencies that airplanes can take advantage of that are just not available to ground transportation. For distances above ~400 miles, air freight can be more efficient than even a freight train for hauling just about anything with a higher value per pound than rocks and gravel.

* gas turbine engines can reach peak thermodynamic efficiencies of ~50% around 30,000 feet, where the intake air is coldest but not too thin. Any combustion engine running at surface conditions can do maybe 20 - 30% efficiency tops.
* air at 30,000 feet is still thin enough to greatly reduce drag compared to ground transportation. Only the vacuum tube trains like Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" will be able to beat that ... at enormous expense.

Not to mention all of the "bonus efficiencies" not related to lower ton-mile/fuel costs that you get "for free"
* Time is money, and air freight also happens to be the fastest mode of transportation. It actually takes more fuel to cruise slower than the design cruise speed of Mach 0.84 or whatever.
* just need an airport with a mile or two of runway at each end, no other infrastructure needs to be built between point A and point B
* lots of old used passenger airplanes are refurbished for freight for relatively cheap at the end of their passenger service life
* lots of excess airport capacity at night when the passengers aren't flooding them

The "distances above 400 miles" is a pretty significant caveat, of course... that's roughly the break-even point for the extra fuel you need to get your cargo airplane up to 30,000 feet so you can save enough fuel during cruise/descent.

Also, with electric batteries and brushless motors also gradually approaching 50% efficiency (when taking advantage of regenerative braking), ground transportation kinda has a shot at achieving gas-turbine-like energy efficiency... at sufficiently slow speeds to keep drag down.

I highly recommend this book:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/...

Therefore the only task of those who write software to grade essays is that the variation of the machine is no worse that the variations of the humans. There is some success in this. Edx has a module that will grade essays. As far as I know the value in this is quicker and more uniform feedback for practice essays.

Well, I'm a humanities guy and I know enough about the scientific method to understand that you don't know whether you have "success" until you test your bright idea in the real world and find out whether it actually works. And that's what MIT professor Les Perelman said in the article you're citing:

“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human graders,” said Perelman, a retired director of writing and a current researcher at MIT.

As Perelman said, some computer students wrote a program that can turn out gibberish that the main robo-grading program consistently scores above the 90th percentile.

Of course humanities majors, who have generally have minimal understanding of advanced technology, hate it. This, of course, includes journalists.

The article you're citing was not written by a journalist, but by a retired MIT writing professor.

So you've gotten it wrong on both the science and the reading comprehension. No mod points for you.

This is not to say that computer graded essays are going to be as good of an assessment as human graded essays. However, it may be good enough, and better than other objective measures, such as fill in the bubble tests. In fact anything that minimizes the cost of open ended free response assessment is going to benefit anyone. Securing multiple guess test is very expensive, and the value of them are highly questionable. They tend to overestimate the value of student how have vague passive knowledge, and underestimate the value of those who have an ability to actively apply knowledge.

I am deducting another point for bad grammar.

Computer graded essays can check whether an essay complies with an algorithm, and they can take care of anything you can reduce to an algorithm. The great success of computer writing was the spell-checker. There is also a grammar-checker which I never use because it doesn't work well enough for me. There are also algorithms to check the format of literature citations, which are useful.

But (as somebody who writes for a living) the most important features of writing depend on an understanding of the content. Most important: Is it correct? As Perelman says, the robo-graders ignore whether what you say is true (or whether it even makes sense). The next thing I look at: If the author takes a controversial position, does he give both sides of the argument? This is what you may know as Neutral Point of View from Wikipedia (although writers have known about it since the ancient Greeks.) Wikipedia actually has a pretty good structure.

Let's remember the purpose of writing: A person communicating an idea to somebody else. When I read something, I'm looking for a good idea, clearly communicated. If the algorithm can't identify a good idea (and as Perelman showed, it can't), then it can't tell me whether the writing is any good. Algorithms have surprised me, but I can't imagine how an algorithm can tell me whether an idea is good.

Therefore the only task of those who write software to grade essays is that the variation of the machine is no worse that the variations of the humans. There is some success in this. Edx has a module that will grade essays. As far as I know the value in this is quicker and more uniform feedback for practice essays. Of course humanities majors, who have generally have minimal understanding of advanced technology, hate it. This, of course, includes journalists.

This is not to say that computer graded essays are going to be as good of an assessment as human graded essays. However, it may be good enough, and better than other objective measures, such as fill in the bubble tests. In fact anything that minimizes the cost of open ended free response assessment is going to benefit anyone. Securing multiple guess test is very expensive, and the value of them are highly questionable. They tend to overestimate the value of student how have vague passive knowledge, and underestimate the value of those who have an ability to actively apply knowledge.

Few people have the space for so many panels to run their house on them — even if the problem of storing it were solved. From MIT:

Imagine that your house uses 48 kWh of electricity per day (about average). If you live in Arizona, where the average solar insolation per year is around 6 kWh/meters squared/day, you’ll need 53 square meters (574 sq ft) of 15% efficient solar panels. If you spend the extra money for 21% efficient solar panels, then you’ll only need 38 square meters (409 sq ft) of solar panels. But if you try to power the same sized house in Vermont, where the average solar insolation per year is around 4 kWh/meters squared/day, you’ll need 80 square meters (861 sq ft) of 15% efficient solar panels and 57 square meters (615 sq ft) of the 21% efficient ones.

And 48kWh, which is cited above as "about average", means, no home-servers running 24x7 (about 200Watts*24h=4.8kWh — or 10% more than the estimate — per server), no super-duper Christmas lights, and other limitations...

No, electricity companies are better positioned to produce electricity. And, truth be told, they should be using these wonder-batteries to store electricity during the night so they wouldn't have to charge more during the day. If only we had them properly competing with each other...

Here's just one of the ones that have passed the turing test.

Your Turing test example is terrible. iirc the slashdot commentors ripped the story to shreds when it appeared here. Other people agreed: http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

Many software applications based on neural networks and other self-evolving/learning AI alogirthms are already in everyday use not only learning complex tasks but also themselves coming up with new and better solutions to them.

Another bad example. Self-learning algorithms aren't at all what you seem to imply here, and I'd love to see you continue to make the same claim after a few days of playing with a neural net implementation (there are tons of free libraries containing machine learning implementations, as well as tutorials).

Uh how about you do your own looking? just try Googling stuff? Its not like this stuff isn't easily findable..

I see you've linked:
- A hardware focused project appearing to emphasize simulating humanoid-like visuals more than implementing any kind of AI (the FAQ for the project even says it doesn't have memory and current research using the system doesn't require it: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/lb...)
- The MIT page for the department that made COG
- An system that uses image recognition to parse extremely simple handwritten commands and then write them out by hand. If this counts as machine intelligence, than so does a simple assembler.
- An "animatronic puppet" (the creators words, not mine), that uses speech recognition/TTS and a standard chatterbot interface to (poorly) mimic a humans responses. Did you notice how it kept talking over the people conversing with it? And that was a cherry picked clip of people talking to it who knew how to hold conversations with the thing. Show me an example of someone asking it a technical question (hell, they can type the question if that makes it easier to parse) and then getting a real answer out of it. e.g. "explain to me how a keyboard works".

There's nothing wrong with being excited about AI developments. It's just that historically, people like you who go around calling things AI that aren't really AI (and have no potential to actually be "AI") have done significant harm to the field by generating unrealistic hype and making promises that can't be delivered. Please take your own advice and google some tutorials and example projects for the neural nets that go into simple image recognition and the markov chains that go into making a chatterbot. Then get back to me about how your examples demonstrate some kind of true machine intelligence in the sensationalist sense of the word.

>> Where is the bot that can pass a Turing test reliably?
Here's just one of the ones that have passed the turing test.
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

>> Where in the world are actual intelligent networks?
>> Where is the machine that can learn complex tasks?
>> where is there a machine that uses something other than a human designed tree search to do things?
Many software applications based on neural networks and other self-evolving/learning AI alogirthms are already in everyday use not only learning complex tasks but also themselves coming up with new and better solutions to them.

>> I hear this crap about machine intelligence thrown out without any significant exemplars of said intelligence.
>> Show me something smarter than Eliza.
Uh how about you do your own looking? just try Googling stuff? Its not like this stuff isn't easily findable..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects...
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I would just be happy if they could make a rearview mirror and side mirrors that don't have blind spots how can I trust them with their technology when they can't even do the basic things

Blind spots don't exist because car design makes for them, blind spots exist because drivers never were taught, or never learned, how to properly set up their car.

I've had old cars and new cars, and none of them have had blind spots. Including the Miata what with it's "huge" c-pillars when top-up, an Rx-8 that people insist had huge blind spots and bad visibility, and a Mini with a small back window and fat c-pillars. All these criticisms are bogus, but people *hate* being told they're wrong.

I could spend many bytes explaining why there is no such thing as blind spots, but you'll likely dismiss my explanation. So here, spend some time educating yourself on the problem and the solution.

One way.

Car and Driver's Way.

This is the one I use, they all mean the same thing anyway.

Those examples of graphemes arent mine, theyre direct from that wikipedia link at the bottom of my post which I suggest you check out. My statements are backed by several sources in my post, and they all agree: for classical (NOT church) latin, "v" is pronounced as a "w". If you want to argue, argue with my sources-- not me. Alternatively, show alternate sources that support your stance.

Im also not clear what you think kerberos is, but is most certainly used in authentication to generate a session token, and is core to the Windows Active Directory protocol. Again: Dont argue with me, argue with my source:
Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography.

But perhaps you can provide sources, if you wish to contradict either the classical latin or the kerberos statements; so far you've said Im wrong but not provided any support for that claim.

Because Bill Clinton thought they should. Congress tried to repeal it in 2005, but the bill failed.

Seems to me like it's time to look at that again.

Point them at the Scratch website and then tell them to never look at it again because it's naughty. Just kidding about the second part, but Scratch is a good way to get them started.

Can we get a FAQ please? Here are the common answers:

* Visually with Angry Birds characters: http://learn.code.org/hoc/1
* Scratch
* http://coderdojo.com/
* Minecraft mods
* http://www.learntomod.com./
* https://pragprog.com/book/ahmi...
* http://codecombat.com/
* http://boardgamegeek.com/board...
* http://boardgamegeek.com/board...
* http://www.gamebooks.org/show_...
* http://venturebeat.com/2014/06...
* http://meetedison.com/
* BASIC
* Vic-20 C64 Compute! magazine
* Raspberry Pi
* Arduino
* Logo

https://scratch.mit.edu/
That is all.

Firstly, I would look to see if there is a CoderDojo - http://coderdojo.com/ - in your area.
CoderDojo is a global volunteer-led community of free programming clubs for young people. These young people, between 7 and 17, learn how to code, develop websites, apps, programs, games and explore technology. In addition to learning to code attendees meet like minded people and get to show off what they’ve been working on.

Secondly, I would look at introductory language we use - Scratch - http://scratch.mit.edu/
Scratch has lots of tutorials aimed directly at kids, and are far better than any of the "type this line and then this one" from various books.

Use Scratch - https://scratch.mit.edu/ It's what CoderDojo uses when teaching kids programming. It has a fun, immediately responsive interface. Bright colours and cartoon characters to attract kids, is easy to make basic games which makes it more fun, and still teaches programming logic.

By making intrusive surveillance devices available inexpensively (perhaps by showing hobbyists how to build their own),

How dare those scum at MIT teach people how to surveil their neighbors and stuff.

The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.

This is what's known as a "rationalization". Pick the one explanation you like, and then find some evidence to support it.

To really choose the best answer without experimentation, you write down *all* the possible explanations, and then pick the one that seems most likely.

(If you can do experiments you can eliminate explanations directly - but when you can't do this, the best course is to list all explanations and pick the simplest one.)

A simpler explanation of the low pass rate is that the online courses are of poor quality.

And indeed, many of the online courses are very low quality - especially the ones from high-end players.

The "Probabalistic Graphical Models" course by Stanford is known as a weeder (students get caught off guard with the difficulty), and the online version demonstrates this: the video shows Daphne Koller standing at a lectern droning on and on(*) with no vocal variety, reading the text of the online slides to the viewer... completely uninteresting and making a simple course boring as hell. (sample video.)

I thumbed through the edX course listing and hit on a course I liked - and the introductory video contained absolutely *no* information about the course! The full text of the course description read something like: "Join me as we explore the boundaries of $subject". (Is it a difficult course? Is it introductory or advanced? What level of math is required? What's the syllabus?)

I mentioned it to the head of edX in a private E-mail, and he responded by saying "that's an affiliate course [ie - from an affiliate institution] and we don't have control of the quality or content".

(WTF? You're running a startup and you don't have control over the quality? And he seemed to intimate that he was more interested in building the scope of their selection than the quality.)

Kahn academy is trying to get feedback from students to improve their presentation and make their lectures more effective, but I don't see any other players doing this.

Everyone's just taping their lectures and putting them online(**). The situation won't change until everyone burns through all the seed money and has to start making a profit based on results. For example, edX got $60 million in seed money, and they're burning through it with no viable business plan.

(*) Keep in mind that I'm critiquing the course, and not Professor Koller.

(**) For a counterpoint example, consider Donald Sadoway's Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, which is *not* a MOOC lecture series but is free for online viewing. Light years ahead of any MOOC course and well worth viewing.

Tried Mosh instead of ssh? Supposed to be better over dodgy links.

I neither agree or disagree. I'm not even reading your entire comments. I have no reason to. I solved the problem we discussed using standard textbook radiative physics methods. I have ZERO reason to go back and try to do it the "Khayman80" way, which is not exactly what I would call "standard" methodology. The textbook way is fine by me and I'm sticking with it. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-23]

One thing Jane said is true. Jane's never read my entire comments, or the comments by any other physicist.

But everything else Jane said is sadly wrong. Jane solved the problem using his own incompetent misunderstanding of his own textbooks. That's why inserting the standard physics definition of the word "net" into Jane's equation reproduces the energy conservation equation Jane's still adamantly rejecting.

Another independent way Jane could see that he misunderstood the "textbook way" would be to learn about how to apply conservation of energy. Here are some introductions: example (backup), example (backup), example (backup).

If Jane would ever bother to read entire comments by physicists, or textbooks about basic physics, Jane would quickly learn that only power passing through a boundary is included in the energy conservation equation across that boundary.

It's just like crayons in a coloring book, Jane.

Maybe to get into those classes you need pre reqs... Like math...

An introductory programming class does not require more than grade school math. My local elementary school teaches programming to 4th graders using Scratch. 90% of them "get it" with little difficulty. They understand loops, conditionals, subroutines, etc. After a few weeks most of them can design an algorithm to say, draw a pentagram, or find the 1000th prime number.

You should watch susskind on youtube discussing inflation. Not only can space be created, infinite space can be created within a finite volume due to infinite time. If you can wrap your brain around that, well it's not easy. Take a look here

But I think that Boston's terrible weather is also a big factor. Here's an analysis of Boston winters that shows the grim reality of 5 or 6 months out of every 12. When sunshine, mild weather, and Silicon Valley jobs beckon on a gloomy February day, it takes a wicked love for the Hub or the Bruins to turn down a good offer. The cost of housing is much higher in the Bay Area, but the bills for heating oil and winter clothing go away, and cars last a lot longer, just to name a few things.

Boston remains one of my favorite American cities to visit (only during baseball season, though), but I no longer [perhaps unfairly] associate it with startups. Maybe the innovative and creative ideas get frozen out.

@NostalgiaForInfinity: "misguided views like these are responsible for the long periods of stagnation and weakness that China has experienced."

The Economic Importance of Indian Opium and Trade with China on Britain's Economy

The First Opium War

Sugar, opium and cotton

Basic coding skills does *not* take years to learn

My son is in 4th grade. His class learned programming using Scratch. Within a few weeks, nearly all of the kids were able to write programs to solve specific problems.

Taking a few weeks to learn a language and calling yourself a programmer is like taking a several week CPR course and calling yourself a doctor.

Basic coding skills does *not* take years to learn

My son is in 4th grade. His class learned programming using Scratch. Within a few weeks, nearly all of the kids were able to write programs to solve specific problems.

Printed parts are still by far inferior to more conventionally produced alternatives. For organs with 3D architecture, by far the most successful approaches have been to basically seed the relevant cell types in layers on a gel or degradable fiber based scaffold. Anthony Atala's group at Wake Forest (no association, just a fan of their work) has made replacement urethras and bladders among many others that have actually been implanted in patients. I believe the bladder work is currently in a phase II clinical trial on its way to becoming more widely available. Sangeeta Bhatia's group has done amazing work on liver tissue, although their focus has been on laboratory samples for drug testing rather than implantation for the time being. They actually do use a 3D printing approach to their work but only to build a sugar-based scaffold that can dissolve away and leave space for blood vessels to be engineered. The tissue itself is just dumped onto the scaffold in a gel slurry and organizes itself.

I think 3D printing tissues is a rather short-sighted approach to assembling structures whose function and shape is self-organized. The most successful approaches thus far (in terms of having products on the market or organs in people) have been strategies that rely on the intrinsic self-organization of tissues. Even more complex structures such as the colonic epithelium can be generated this way.

I was referring to the various reports around 2010 and 2011 saying that over 30% of the Internet content was porn. Those numbers have been called into question (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090), but from network experience and dealings with bulk storage and network traffic, I'll continue to claim that it's the most _likely_ content of any single Petabyte sized archive. I'll agree that it's not the only possible content of such a large repository.

You've a valid point that "it''s still legal" for ordinary pornography, at least in most countries. Child porn is the political leverage used to censor or filter Internet content in many countries. I'll be quite curious to see if this case actually involved child porn, or if it was merely distasteful or a means to get other traffic data for the prosecutors.

There was n infamous case about Amateur Action BBS, a very popular porn site that was framed for dealing in child porn. The frame failed, since they did not even open the box of content they hadn't ordered, but the postal inspector from Tennessee succeeded in convicting a California couple for content that was previously ruled to be constitutionally protected in California.. The history is fascinating: there was a good thread at the time in EFF discussion groups, still available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma... b

Actually, Rousseau is just copying from Aristotle's Politics [5, v]. Here is an interesting quote that reminds us of our own times. (in this translation despotes is made into 'tyrant') :

Revolutions in democracies are generally caused by the intemperance of demagogues, who either in their private capacity lay information against rich men until they compel them to combine (for a common danger unites even the bitterest enemies), or coming forward in public stir up the people against them. The truth of this remark is proved by a variety of examples. At Cos the democracy was overthrown because wicked demagogues arose, and the notables combined. At Rhodes the demagogues not only provided pay for the multitude, but prevented them from making good to the trierarchs the sums which had been expended by them; and they, in consequence of the suits which were brought against them, were compelled to combine and put down the democracy. The democracy at Heraclea was overthrown shortly after the foundation of the colony by the injustice of the demagogues, which drove out the notables, who came back in a body and put an end to the democracy. Much in the same manner the democracy at Megara was overturned; there the demagogues drove out many of the notables in order that they might be able to confiscate their property. At length the exiles, becoming numerous, returned, and, engaging and defeating the people, established the oligarchy. The same thing happened with the democracy of Cyme, which was overthrown by Thrasymachus. And we may observe that in most states the changes have been of this character. For sometimes the demagogues, in order to curry favor with the people, wrong the notables and so force them to combine; either they make a division of their property, or diminish their incomes by the imposition of public services, and sometimes they bring accusations against the rich that they may have their wealth to confiscate.

Of old, the demagogue was also a general, and then democracies changed into tyrannies. Most of the ancient tyrants were originally demagogues. They are not so now, but they were then; and the reason is that they were generals and not orators, for oratory had not yet come into fashion. Whereas in our day, when the art of rhetoric has made such progress, the orators lead the people, but their ignorance of military matters prevents them from usurping power; at any rate instances to the contrary are few and slight. Tyrannies were more common formerly than now, for this reason also, that great power was placed in the hands of individuals; thus a tyranny arose at Miletus out of the office of the Prytanis, who had supreme authority in many important matters. Moreover, in those days, when cities were not large, the people dwelt in the fields, busy at their work; and their chiefs, if they possessed any military talent, seized the opportunity, and winning the confidence of the masses by professing their hatred of the wealthy, they succeeded in obtaining the tyranny. Thus at Athens Peisistratus led a faction against the men of the plain, and Theagenes at Megara slaughtered the cattle of the wealthy, which he found by the river side, where they had put them to graze in land not their own. Dionysius, again, was thought worthy of the tyranny because he denounced Daphnaeus and the rich; his enmity to the notables won for him the confidence of the people. Changes also take place from the ancient to the latest form of democracy; for where there is a popular election of the magistrates and no property qualification, the aspirants for office get hold of the people, and contrive at last even to set them above the laws. A more or less complete cure for this state of things is for the separate tribes, and not the whole people, to elect the magistrates.

And the online companies in question probably have deanonymized all those accounts and know exactly who is really behind them

Example: How hard is it to 'de-anonymize' cellphone data?

Researchers at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, analyzed data on 1.5 million cellphone users in a small European country over a span of 15 months and found that just four points of reference, with fairly low spatial and temporal resolution, was enough to uniquely identify 95 percent of them.

The NSA can't subvert a keyserver.

HAH! Which rock were you born under? I use 'whois' and 'dig' to find out who owns the IP address, and anything with a U.S. IP address is questionable Under US 'Law', the NSA can do anything it pleases and even if you're forced into it it's illegal to tell anyone about it.. 'andycanfield.com' is registered in Thailand and points to a hardware box in Bangkok where I myself have installed and maintain Ubuntu Linux. AFAIK the NSA can NOT subvert my server, although of course they can subvert the routers leading to the server.

Also, I see that your key is on a keyserver: http://pgpkeys.mit.edu/pks/loo...

I have NEVER posted my key on any keyserver. What other people chose to spider and copy is out of my control.

The NSA can't subvert a keyserver. At least, at worst they can replace the keys with their own, but then the Web Of Trust would render those keys untrusted. Getting the key from a keyserver or copying it from a webpage is equivalent. The benefit of the keyserver is if you get an email from someone signed by key X, your client can fetch the key from the keyserver then calculate if you have any trust of that key.

Also, I see that your key is on a keyserver: http://pgpkeys.mit.edu/pks/loo... as any key can be published to a keyserver regardless if you have the corresponding private key.

Funny, I just watched a lecture on quantum physics that uses the Jain analogy of the blind men and the elephant in treating wave-particle duality. So physicists have learned from Jainism's theory of knowledge. Maybe you can too. May nonviolence grow on you.

Every scientist in the field who does not have in interest in Mars 1 who have commented have commented negatively about the project. Take a look at this paper from some MIT students.

The only thing preventing that to happen is either political will or money.

You are absolutely correct. The big problem with this scheme is money. They have no viable plan to gather the money to do it. Sorry but selling media rights to watch people die on another planet is not going to bring in the billions of dollars necessary to keep things going. Have you ever heard of a reality show pull in over $4.5billion? No country in their right mind would back this as all it will be is a drain on taxes money. Yes, money is a huge issue and Mars 1 has not solved that problem.

Accusing them right now for scam is lible and insult.

Considering they are no longer even using the cover of contracts with legitimate companies I say now is a great time to call scam.

It's funny that you should mention that. Werner Koch still uses a 1024D key for email. In fact, nearly everyone at g10code.com either has no key listed or uses 1024D. Most of the people involved in the development of GnuPG use ancient 1042D keys.

It's not just GnuPG, though. Phil Zimmermann only uses 1024D.

Perhaps there's something we're missing?

Interesting that this comes from MIT Media Lab - where you can find job descriptions like the following:

2. UNDEFINED DISCIPLINE

The Media Lab is a cross-disciplinary research organization focusing on the invention of new media technologies that radically improve the ways people live, learn, work, and play.

We are seeking a new kind of early career faculty member, not defined by discipline, rather by his or her unique and iconoclastic experience, style, and points of view. You can be a designer, inventor, scientist, or scholar – any combination – as long as you make things that matter. Impact is key.

This means somebody with at least these three sets of characteristics:
1) Being deeply versed in a minimum of two fields, preferably not ones normally juxtaposed;
2) Being an orthogonal and counter-intuitive thinker, even a misfit within normal structures;
3) Having a fearless personality, boundless optimism, and desire to change the world.

Any disciplines apply as long as their confluence shows promise of solving big, difficult, and long-term problems. And, most importantly, candidates must explain why their work really can only be done at the Media Lab. We prefer candidates not be similar to our existing faculty. We welcome applicants who have never considered academic careers. If you fit into typical academia, this is probably not the job for you.

The position has no specific degree requirement. Instead, candidates must show evidence of engineering accomplishment, scientific achievement, design innovation or artistic accomplishment. We are looking for a strong mix of invention, discovery and expression.

Applications should consist of one URL—the web site can be designed in whatever manner best characterizes the candidate’s unique qualifications. Web site should include a CV or link to a CV.

I wanted to nominate David Icke :)

Amen to this.

I am a "homeschooling" parent. This does NOT mean my children are taught solely by myself and/or my wife, and it does NOT mean they are taught solely at home. It DOES mean that we have personally selected and combined a number of different educational opportunties for them. These include (but are not limited to):

Enrolling in college coursework while still in high school. Example: Harvard Math 23b. The majority of students in this class are admitted Harvard freshmen, but it is also available in an open enrollment capacity through Extension for anyone of any age willing to pay tuition. I like that peer group for "socialization" a whole lot better than the kids at my local public high school.

Hiring the chair of the language department at a local private high school to come to our home to provide personalized one-on-one instruction in classical Greek and Latin.

Hiring multiple music teachers for piano, guitar, theory, and composition.

Participation in team sports at the local health club.

Engaging a flight instructor for our son to earn a private pilot's rating.

Successfully completing qualifying flights for TARC

The Internet (Obviously). Taking advantage of online educational programs such as AOPS and edX and Open Courseware

Stocking our home with thousands of quality print books and plenty of subscriptions to lots of quality print journals (e.g. Economist, Nature, Lapham's Quarterly, IEEE publications, etc.)

Buying a whole bunch of the Great Courses

Joining CTY

Plenty of socratic dialogue with Mom & Dad. And plenty of unstructured time.

Flexibility to travel (including abroad) during the school year.

Concrete advice for OP: First, read The Underground History of American Education. Make of it what you will --- just include it (or criticisms of it) as a data point. Next, decide if any your local school choices (either public or private) are awesome. Do they approach the quality of Exeter or Boston Latin or Bronx Science? Understand the concept of a feeder school and that this concept can start at the elementary level. Got great public or private school options you like and can afford? Go for it. Not so much? Then go ahead and homeschool kindergarten. I guarantee you that your drop-out wife is capable of teaching your child to read and anything else they are supposed to learn in kindergarten. I guarantee you that unless you are completely negligent that your child will (if you choose) be able to enter first grade after a year of homeschooling and do fine. And I guarantee you that after a year you will be in a much better position to understand if more homeschooling is the right choice.

Sorry

http://web.mit.edu/deeparch/www/home/index.html