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Step 1: liquify nitrogen.

Shouldn't step 0.5 be, "make air a liquid"?

(For some reason I am now reminded of Hugh Gallagher).

Pirate material templates? Why not open-source? :)

If they've got open-source genetic sequences, why not material templates and physical product designs?

This is where I see true benefit beginning to happen.

If you're really interested in wearable stuff, check out MIT's wearable computing lab - they have reviews on various keyboards and other hardware. I wouldn't recommend buying the stuff to avoid RSI's, but there are some cool toys around.

It is a threat: ugly and dangerous.

Your point is well taken, but you should know that the label "nerd" is a badge of honor to any MIT alum. Witness.

1st - Do any of you see the hypocrisy in buying from the Russian site? Are you the same people complaining about the outsourcing of American jobs/economy?

Though I do not think I speak for all of slashdot, I think that it's safe to say that some would like to see the music industry (aka RIAA aka The Untouchables) be outsourced downward

2nd - Has it occurred to anyone that the music industry is now mob run?

Stop giving the mob a bad name. It's either these people or maybe these people.

I'm 35. I've only just figured out who these girls are because my daughters (aged 3 & 5) watched an old video of theirs from the 80's.

God, the video is AWFUL. What the hell is so great about two girls (who look vaguely like "Troll dolls") pretending to sing and act? They mostly just sit there and look tired of cameras pointed at them.

I think it is hard to overestimate the long term impact of this technology, if it lives up to its promises. This could be the final piece in the puzzle needed to make wearable computing a mainstream reality (rather than a thing for visionary geeks). My guess is that within 10 years of the first real massmarket product, we will all be wearing those when working, driving, shopping, etc.

I know replying to oneself is lame, but I found a nice URL with a very comprehensive definition of what currently is considered as life:

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/finalpresentation/sc ience/life.html

Indeed my definition was incomplete in the respect that it focused on reproduction. Others are (from above link):

1. Shows evidence of growth and replication;
2. Shows evidence of purposeful energy transfer;
3. Responds to stimuli;
4. Acts in such a way as to ensure self-preservation;
5. Is significantly different from the surrounding environment.

More details at the link.

Whoops, forgot the tags. Use this instead. http://parts.mit.edu/

I just think it's vaguely interesting. They both have somewhat strongish ideological opinions, and are well known for them. Also I've become interested in that building for other reasons. I've been going to MIT for HSSP and I like wandering the halls of MIT. But building 32 is new and has slightly stricter security, so it's got a certain allure. And then I find out that both these mildly well known MIT guys are moving into the new building.

I might change my sig to some sort of Futurama quote soonish, though.

My advice to you would be to drop the whole CET idea and get a real CS or a real engineering degree. They will be worth a whole lot more in the long run. Or do a dual major with CS/EE and NOT a CET. A CET will cover the basics for CS and EE, but nothing more, you will have lots of general concepts but little hard core, real knowlege. Most high ranked Universities don't offer CET programs, the only ones I know that offer things like CET are 2 year programs, mid-low ranked state schools or ITT Tech trade school type places. A real technical institution like MIT/RPI/CMU etc will only offer REAL enginneering and REAL computer science. Not some strange cross CET that really doesn't explore the nuances of either.

Personally I have a dual major with CS and Electronic Art/Communication. Again, I would highly reccomend a dual major over a major that claims to combine two others. It will be more work but it will pay off in the long run.

I said that _if_ "you are sticking by your '1/10th of 1 percent' would make big changes" _then_ you would have to admit that we are making huge changes. Or are you saying that the sun changing by 1/10th of 1 percent is significant, but humans changing its effective radiation by 1 percent is small? Or are you saying that humans haven't effected the radiation budget of the earth?

It is quite likely that humans are responsible for much of the last several decades of warming. There have been plenty of attribution studies attribution studies that have shown this statistically. More to the point, if we maintain a business-as-usual path, we are very likely to radically warm the earth over the coming centuries. We can't stop change from happening, but we can take actions that would reduce the rate of the change that we are causing. And yes, we need to balance the costs of emissions controls against the expected value of the environmental benefits we will receive - I believe that economic growth is vital to improving the health, happiness, and well-being of humans, but not without regulation.

The yahoos who keep going on about not doing anything to reduce emissions until we are absolutely certain about its impact are ignoring the fact that decisions are made under uncertainty all the time. There is certainly enough evidence that we are impacting the earth's climate, and enough basic scientific understanding to know that we will continue to do so, and enough economics understanding to be able to make some guesses about what the right balance of controls are, that we should be at least implementing starter policies (not necessarily Kyoto - I'd prefer a carbon tax, and real scientific investments into fusion and zero-carbon technologies)

Or we can stick our fingers in our ears and chant mindlessly that "its not happening" and "its not our fault" because, after all, this is a long term problem and who cares if future generations curse us for our short sightedness?

There is a chance that you are right, maybe we'll luck out, maybe the climate sensitivity will be at the low end of the model results. Are you willing to take the greenhouse gamble for the next generation? I prefer to take the optimal path given our level of understanding rather than saying "maybe nothing will happen so let's do nothing".

-Marcus

FileMaker Pro has had relational functionality since version 3.0, released in early 1996. I used it for a one-to-many relation in my wedding invitation database way back in 1996. One table was for invitations, the other was for invitees on each invitation (a one-to-many relation).

FileMaker Pro 3.0 from Claris Goes Relational
FileMaker Pro 3.0 Has Relational Powers

And a nice looking geek chick girl at that.

Here's a picture of here.

Now, don't everyone rush all at once!

From the last time I posted:

I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in what Technology Review has to say. With a quick look at their staff you will see where their priorities lay. They have one fact checker and 26 people involved in marketing and advertising.

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

Besides that, Technology Review is twice removed from MIT. They are run by the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is loosely associated with MIT.

I would really like to know why Slashdot keeps posting fantastical stories from that ratings-driven rag.

Entirely as organised as a crystalline. In fact, structures similar this are indeed termed crystals - see a good site on photonic crystals for examples.

This system consists of a periodic lattice convolved with a basis (the onion). This is in fact the definition of a crystal, as any condensed-matter-physicist will tell you. Any system with this property will disply many analogues of the properties of traditional crystals.

par [mit.edu]

Does anyone know where I could find some sort of evidence that there is a danger to begin with?

Step 1: Go here.
Step 2: Bake on high heat for four years.
Step 3: Calculate the odds of crashing to six significant digits.

What lack of consideration are you talking about? Just two weeks ago Slashdot ran an article about little robots playing soccer, epitomizing present-day situatedness in the field of AI (eg embodiment), not to mention that Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratory has already pur forth a direct argument for situatedness. As a matter of fact, he could be considered the most knowledgeable member in the entire field of AI, so your philisophical musings are lacking substance.

Java, among other high level languages (lisp/scheme, Objective CAML, Standard ML, Haskell, etc), are memory safe because they hide the issue of memory management under the carpet by using a garbage collector. Since the language itself does not have the expressive power to deal with memory directly (some has strong type checking that guarantees even stronger memory safety properties), they're considered "safe." However, a clever hacker might handcraft in bytecode, thus bypassing the type system entirely. The runtime system of the language (which you may consider as the operating system in a board sense) still needs to perform dynamic security policy checking.

On the other hand, the critism on Java or any other high level languages as an interpreted language is ill-founded, as those languages can be compiled to run as native executable.

That message changes each time, here's the full list.

I really like the message displayed while loading a map: "Please wait while a large software vendor in Seattle takes over the world"

The Japanese already do. Granted, it's not streaming or HDTV... it's digital satellite direct to cell phones, and through repeaters in rural areas. 70 channels, though, and crystal clear.

If the next 10 years brings us as far as the last ten, the big thing will be something you don't have a worse version of now. My expectation is that MIThril type systems will be hot in ten years, and that the stuff we do with them will change the way we perceive things as much as cell phones have so far.

In 1994, a man walking down the street talking to himself was clearly insane. Now he's just gadget savvy. Conversation can be anywhere, anytime... iPods and the like make music anywhere, anytime.... expect the same sort of thing for visual perception. In Duke3D cooperative, you could switch to see what your buddy was seeing and hearing (maybe it was Shadow Warrior). In 2014, you'll be able to do that in real life.

Lots of older buildings mean not all of them have wireless coverage yet--but the interactive campus map shows which ones do. Of course, since that list says MIT is in Boston (it isn't), perhaps they're trying to use WiFi in the old Boston location, which MIT hasn't used in almost 100 years....

Lots of older buildings mean not all of them have wireless coverage yet--but the interactive campus map shows which ones do. Of course, since that list says MIT is in Boston (it isn't), perhaps they're trying to use WiFi in the old Boston location, which MIT hasn't used in almost 100 years....

...are we to throw out matching bullets to guns as well?

As I posted in another message, though, what if the black box information was encrypted in such a way that only the car owner could decrypt it (e.g. with the owner's public key, requiring the owner's private key to decrypt)? Would you call for a court order to demand the decryption key?

An interesting approach to side-stepping such an order to divulge the decryption key would be to use winnowing & chaffing to encrypt the black box information:

"...if law enforcement were to demand to see an authentication key so it could identify the wheat, the sender could yield up one such key that identifies a wheat subsequence containing an innocuous message as the wheat, and leaving everything else as ``chaff''. The real message would still be buried in the chaff."

An interesting approach to side-stepping such an order to divulge the decryption key would be to use winnowing & chaffing to encrypt:

"...if law enforcement were to demand to see an authentication key so it could identify the wheat, the sender could yield up one such key that identifies a wheat subsequence containing an innocuous message as the wheat, and leaving everything else as ``chaff''. The real message would still be buried in the chaff."

Jaguars have white spots. OS X is called Jaguar.

Mike told me about this a few months ago, and I'm very excited by it.
The Helium is a sweet tablet laptop, and we've got a mailing list for running Debian on it already:
http://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/helium -debian

It ships with Lycoris linux, and the laptop is available from other dealers under other names/brands, including with Windows bundled. Element sells it without.

The only things not working under Linux are the zc301 chip webcam and the 4in1 card reader, neither of which has linux drivers.

As has been proven by something called Carnival Booth any system for screening potential threats that does not have a sufficiently random element can be beaten. The system will supposedly screen some people everytime and will screen some people none of the time. This means if I'm a terrorist and me and 9 terrorist friends get on a plane, and one of us doesn't get screened, we send him on 5 more flights, if he never gets screened there's a good chance he never will (assuming nothing changes his risk status). He's then a good candidate to do bad things. Basically, the system provides a way for terrorists to find out who's a good candidate that wont be stopped while trying to get onto the plane.

That's my objection to the system. Furthermore, why is racial profiling considered evil? It's not saying, oh you're arabic, you must be a terrorist, it's saying you're arabic, x% of terrorists we've found are arabic, so if we screen more people who look like you, we might catch more terrorists. Obviously we shouldn't screen based solely on race but why is it bad to single out people who fall into a group that historically has been more likely to be a problem as opposed to senator's w/ metal in their hips or old grandmothers w/ hip replacements?

The way it works is called the carnival booth attack, and it is described in much detail in this paper.

The basic idea is very simple. A person gets a score from the system, which is based on how likely they are to be a terrorist. Then, CAPPS II has most of the searches directed at people with high scores. So, a terrorist group needs only do a number of test runs, and see who does and doesn't get searched. The people who don't get searched obviously have low scores, and so they use them for the attacks. And in case you were wondering, yes, the terrorists are already using this scheme -- it was used in the 9/11 attacks. The hijackers did test runs, on the same exact flights to make sure everything worked as planned.

So, if there was an actual tradeoff to be made, then a rational debate could be had about the appropriate tradeoffs to make. But when they try to take away my privacy and as a result decrease the security, that I have a serious problem with.

mya, i saw this a while back, theres tons of projects like this, but few seem to be making it anywhere. perhaps because the problem isnt quite the human/tool interface problem, its the human/human interface problem.

anyhoo: MIT Project Oxygen
been covered here before, but for the love of redundancy...

Joe doesn't know any local linux geeks that'll come fix something for a 6 pack of Duff

Maybe if he tried offering Gunniess instead, he would get a better reception?

Oh come on, it's not like you haven't sat down with $RELATIVE_FROM_USA to fix $COMPUTER_PROBLEM and been offered something like crudwiser. Ick.

Refined tastes on technology need not imply a favoritism to non-domestic American beverages. But this is an important facet of software that people leave out: culture.

I view that whole problem with software is not about the number of machines installed. The problem is about people, attitudes and perceptions.

I feel that addressing the difference of community will be the single most challenging task facing popular adoption of tools like Linux. The OS installed on a user's computer is a choice of that user. It is up to you to change that user's attitude. They will put up with horrid quality when they don't know of a better alternative.

In my opinion culture clash between 'Joe Sixpack Windows-User' and everybody else is dramatic. Both the Apple and $FREE_OS communities like to view themselves as fringe or special groups. They celebrate their difference from the mainstream. Pure and unadulterated Windows users form a different community than the users of Apple or $FREE_OS products. They belive the tools they have work and work adequately. The common users are people who are sufficiently content with their pre-packaged choice to not look outside the beige box. Due to bad practices by Microsoft, they also form the largest community of individual personal computer users.

It has been said that the I.Q. of a group is the lowest I.Q. of the members of the group divided by the number of members of that group (think communication overhead when talking with slow people.) Fortunately for the 'Aunt Tillies' of the world, individual users can have quite a solid grasp of basic computer skills. Unfortunately, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance imply a lot of ineria.

While 'Aunt Tillie, CTO/CFO' grasps software quality, their grasp may be of the level of the average car buyer. This is a person who only needs to know about various cars during the rare purchase of a car. In the M$ dominated media of software boxes at your local $MEGA_MART, communicating the benefits of something like Linux or Apple over Microsoft products will require overcoming the established noise level of $ billions in marketing

This is why Microsoft is 50% marketing. This is why commercial Linux distributions are a Good Thing. This is why Apple is still here. The best hackers of the world have been excellent social engineers before anything else. It's time to put that 'social' part to a very good use.

Social engineering of the common man to want quality in software, rather than just settling for third best is possible. After helping run a student organization for Linux users for a few years, I have seen remarkable progress in the quality of various distributions. However, problems with GUI's, driver availability and application compatibility are but small technical hurdles that can be solved with adequate coding.

If you care about software quality then talk to you neighbor. Show off your computers. Maybe even offer them a Guinness while you watch DVDs on your PC with those neighbors. Get the word out.

Software patents considered harmful
Why Patents are Bad for Software
Knuth's letter to the Patent Office

Software patents considered harmful
Why Patents are Bad for Software
Knuth's letter to the Patent Office

Software patents considered harmful
Why Patents are Bad for Software
Knuth's letter to the Patent Office

I saw a portion of Nicolas Collins' entertaining workshop at the Tank last night in NYC. Incredibly fun and interesting stuff no matter which side of the noise versus music argument you find yourself, particularly if you are curious about hacking CD players, licking circuit boards, etc... Mr. Collins is an assistant professor at the Art Institute of Chicago and Editor-in-Chief for the LMJ and is teaching a 3-week workshop on Circuit Bending in June. I haven't been able to find any links to the workshop just yet.

No! Definitely not! Really! :-)

Most faults are software problems, not hardware, so having different machines won't help. Further, interestingly, most major software faults (at least, of the sort that make it through serious testing) tend to be conceptual problems, not coding ones, and different people tend to make the same mistakes. This means in practice that even when you have completely independent software implementations (called n-version programming), they're frequently all wrong in the same way at the same times. See the famous Knight & Leveson paper.

I would look at the following technologies:
WordNet is well known although not that powerfull.
Common sense is really a beta but still its a big database.
Cyc is really cool, but not all free. Look at cycL the language they developped.

I think a simple thing like having integrated access to wikipedia articles or dictionny.com from the browser would be cool. Amazon I don't know.

Fortunately there is a middle way between traditional academic publishers and author self-publication on the web: online academic journals run by the scientists themselves. A good example in my field is the Journal of Machine Learning Research which was formed when the entire editorial board resigned from the overpriced Machine Learning Journal. Online access is free, while a low-price is published to satisfy the legacy requirements of libraries, copyright law, tenure review committees, and the like. Speaking of copyright: in contrast to traditional publishers, authors do not have to sign away their copyright when they publish in JMLR.

The result? Three years after its inception, JMLR is the highest-impact journal in Artificial Intelligence. This is by no means an isolated case, but part of a sea change in academic publishing. More and more such journals are being setup, often in direct competition to overpriced conventional publications, and with support from academic libraries.

The "author pays" model is a last-ditch effort by traditional academic publishers to wring profits from scientific communication, an activity that in essence has always been free (as in -dom). Apparently they haven't noticed yet that all the scarcities that their business model depended on - from trees to typesetting to transport - have simply been removed by technology. Given the free volunteer labor that scientists routinely provide, and the existing host infrastructure at the institutions where they work, the cost of running an online scientific journal is, for all practical purposes, zero.

Fortunately there is a middle way between traditional academic publishers and author self-publication on the web: online academic journals run by the scientists themselves. A good example in my field is the Journal of Machine Learning Research which was formed when the entire editorial board resigned from the overpriced Machine Learning Journal. Online access is free, while a low-price is published to satisfy the legacy requirements of libraries, copyright law, tenure review committees, and the like. Speaking of copyright: in contrast to traditional publishers, authors do not have to sign away their copyright when they publish in JMLR.

The result? Three years after its inception, JMLR is the highest-impact journal in Artificial Intelligence. This is by no means an isolated case, but part of a sea change in academic publishing. More and more such journals are being setup, often in direct competition to overpriced conventional publications, and with support from academic libraries.

The "author pays" model is a last-ditch effort by traditional academic publishers to wring profits from scientific communication, an activity that in essence has always been free (as in -dom). Apparently they haven't noticed yet that all the scarcities that their business model depended on - from trees to typesetting to transport - have simply been removed by technology. Given the free volunteer labor that scientists routinely provide, and the existing host infrastructure at the institutions where they work, the cost of running an online scientific journal is, for all practical purposes, zero.

The "under the hood" argument is the shortsightedness that keeps Linux off the desktop. These are the factors that make a product successful:

• Brand Recognition
• Visual Styling
• Usefulness (ease of use also applies here)
• Value

Right now Linux has little to no brand recognition. That's changing with IBM's advertisements and the SCO legal case, however if you still ask someone walking down the street what Linux is, 75% of the people won't be able to give you an answer.

Visually, Linux has a number of issues, however the most important in this case is there is nothing to visually distinguish itself from other Windows like interfaces. It's the beige box of the computer case world.

Usefulness is where Linux has had a lot of progress and is why it has the popularity in the IT world that it does. However most of the usefulness is on the server side of things - cheap quick way of setting up www, network security, and file sharing. The desktop productivity applications - key to getting Linux on the desktop - have a ways to go before they are comparable feature and ease of use wise to their Windows and Mac counterparts.

The concept of Free has yet to add any value to the Open-Source world, and beyond that the fact you can get Linux for free (no cost) leads to the point in this article makes that money conveys value. We can go back to your car example to make this point - What will the consumer think is better, the $9000 Kia or the $13,000 Toyota? At least here the Kia has some value, Linux with no cost, is the car on the side of the road with a B/O (best offer) sign in the window, who knows what your going to get?

Of course we have gotten off topic at this point, however the key to getting on track with Linux on the desktop, and the point of most of the comments, is to present a GUI that is innovative, easy to use, and that doesn't look like anything else. Doing this will bring brand recognition, and add value to Linux.

I remember that episode. And here's some more related tech from the MIT Media Lab's wearable computing timeline:

Steve Mann has a web site with more info on wearable cameras.

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the
history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry,
and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's
not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson
and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In
the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the
4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be
forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed
suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly
violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling
internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of
various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of
the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he
documents on his
website. Mr. de Raadt's
stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion
of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality
product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD
distribution make code sharing an arduous task.
Research conducted at MIT
found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed
TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to

this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental
flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay,
The Cathedral and the
Bazaar,
rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones
in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that
centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has
significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by
the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating
the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is
licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard
and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its
earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux
gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will
resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

There are several P2P research projects that are looking at building reliabale and scalable P2P systems.

Take a look at Tapestry, and Chord (and read some of the papers) to understand the issues involved in providing scalable and high performance P2P services. Not only is scalable search and overlay graph connectivity an issue, but also node failure and short session times of P2P nodes.

Additionally, when you actually handle the issue of downloading data, building application-lvel multicast trees to distribute the data efficiently on a large scale is not easy. Two papers from SOSP '03 SplitStream, and Bullet address that issue.

Don't experiment too much with caffeine, it is definitely unhealthy in large quantities.

Hmm, this needs to be more scientific. Why don't you just shorten the wait and eat 50 2 cup caffeine pills. On second thought a quick google search turns up this. Make sure you write things down fast so we know how far you got!

I was born in Massachusetts and am therefore somewhat biased, but having worked all over the country I always enjoy coming home. I've never lived directly in Boston and thus can't comment on life there, but living far enough out of the city to get some occasional quiet while still being close enough to it to enjoy its entertainment, schools, hospitals, etc. is a pretty good mix.

The Boston area has many strengths. It has one of the best local music scenes with some of the best local bands, some of the best pizza, good nightlife, decent public transportation, active special interest groups in any topic you care to name, and of course a really strong computer community.

Seems like we should give the people at mit something to do at least... They are starting to exhibit some strange geekish behavior. Just look at this: Random Hall Laundry