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They do if they act like a public square, and they clearly do. https://mtsu.edu/first-amendme...

Agree. Even if you do it with depleted uranium, and you suppose the "virtual electron effect" increases in proportional to the square of the number of protons in the nucleus, you might get an index of refraction in the ballpark of n = 1.000000033. Applying the lensmaker's formula, a convex lens with radii of curvature of 1 cm will have a focal length of ....

150 kilometers.

Well first they can get much smaller radii of curvature using the good old fashioned fresnel lens technology; with photolithographic fabrication the could not only get the lens radii of curvature down into the micrometer range they could stack hundreds or thousands into a lens system only a cm thick and only expend trivial effort.

Agree. Even if you do it with depleted uranium, and you suppose the "virtual electron effect" increases in proportional to the square of the number of protons in the nucleus, you might get an index of refraction in the ballpark of n = 1.000000033. Applying the lensmaker's formula, a convex lens with radii of curvature of 1 cm will have a focal length of ....

150 kilometers.

So the gamma ray imaging camera you want to build for airport security will have to be roughly the same size as your flight. No, not the length of the plane, the mileage.

not pissing-off a malevolent, anonymous mass
  Yeah, the wrong sort of people pissed off a malevolent, anonymous mass before. In order for vigilantism to win, good people need only do nothing.

Strikes me, that they actually pissed off an indifferent, anonymous mass, thereby making it subsequently, malevolent.

Poking hornet nests has a habit of doing that, you know.

not pissing-off a malevolent, anonymous mass
Yeah, the wrong sort of people pissed off a malevolent, anonymous mass before. In order for vigilantism to win, good people need only do nothing.

You are really looking for 2 things:
1. How can I teach kids to start thinking about how to develop algorithms
2. What is a good programming language for beginners

The best solution I've found is Karel and pascal

Karels home page (with a C version of Karel shown) is here http://www.cs.mtsu.edu/~untch/karel/

The Pascal version is in the book. I think pascal is a better language for teaching good programming practices rather than C It's not that you can't in C but Pascal makes it easier to teach without having questions come up about idiosyncrasies about a program they may have found or other books they might have read about C.

I went to Middle Tenn State Univ. My major is Recording Industry Management (I am an audio engineer). When everyone graduates from the RIM major they all want RIM jobs. http://www.mtsu.edu/~record/

It seems to me that the fault was your teacher's for not teaching basic concepts, as opposed to the language's. If you were taught the basic concepts, C++ is a fine first language.

If you want an introduction to OOP, try Karel the Robot. If you want a C++ book, consider Maria and Gary Litvin's C++ for You++ . (Absolutely ridiculous title, I agree, but you learn what you need to know without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty.) It's designed for AP Computer Science, but you certainly don't have to teach to the test.

I am an audio engineer, and the college I graduated from has a MFA program and they do this sort of thing all the time. Check it out:
http://mtsu.edu/~record/

There is a book written by this guy: http://mtsu.edu/~record/hull.html which talks about that. In fact it includes 3 income streams: publishing/songwriting, recording, and live performance and shows how each stream interacts with one another.

I am an audio engineer and have a (4 year BS) degree in recording.

In college I specifically took a class about high-end audio. It was divided into critical listening and "audiophile" topics.

Essentially there are some differences in technology. ICs DO indeed sound more harsh and shrill than tubes which of course sound warmer but not as "bright". Also the quality of the internal components have an effect as well. This of course is in terms of an analog signal. Once a signal becomes "digital" then unless bits are lost, the components don't really effect the quality of the sound (assuming the D/A converters are not hosed).

CDs of course sound different than audio. This is primarily due to quantization error in the sampling process. Essentially they are only 16 bits which means 96 (or 98) dB of dynamic range. But there is also some distortion that happens which isn't directly audiable, but we do tend to "precieve" or "sense" it anyway. This of course assumes we are listening critically at it.

When CDs originally came out, they were still being mastered with the same technique as vinyl. Vinyl has the RIAA curve applied to it in order to save physical space on the platter and then the curve is de-applied upon playback with an RIAA approved device. Well, CD players don't have that reverse RIAA curve, so a lot of these first CDs sounded like ass because all of their low end was nixed. That tended to give a very very bad taste in the mouths of audiophiles.

I don't buy into the $500 cable thing, but it can be proven that you get what you pay for. If you use a $20 cable from radio shack it might not be as high as quality as a $40 or $70 cable. I have personally never heard the difference between a "professional" cable and an "audiophile" cable but I know people who swear by that stuff. The only thing I can chalk it up to is that maybe we don't fully understand how we precieve or sense audio and sound.

BTW, the book which was our "textbook" for that class at http://www.mtsu.edu/~record/ was The Complete Guide to High-End Audio:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0964084961/002-70 81894-1600862?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v =glance

The book was half and half - half was a bunch of audiophile garbage, and the other half was fact and the science and technology of audio. A good read if you want to learn more about sound and modern audio technology.

If you want to know exactly how the math and science behind this works visit this page:
http://physics.mtsu.edu/~wmr/log_3.htm

It tells you how to calculate Pascals, SPL, Watts, dB, and SIL and how they are all related. ...and yes IAAAE (I Am An Audio Engineer)

good thing it's not written in "karel the robot", a simplified logo-like language. That language has no turn right command, so you have to define it as three 90 degree left turns.

... all the way from 1924.

They knew they were involved. They know they were being monitored. They were participating in yet another replication of the Hawthorne studies http://www.mtsu.edu/~pmccarth/io_hist.htm (halfway down).

All they needed to know was someone was watching (they signed consent forms) and be told what to do (they received emails).

Now, redesign it in the form of Stanley Milgram's Harvard experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) and have the emails say "Locate the spammer that sent this, and remove any one of their major organs through any existing orifice", and you've got my interest.

I attend Middle State Tennessee University in the Nashville area. My major is the recording industry management program and I am about to graduate in 36 days and seek employment as an audio engineer.

I have been required to take music biz and law courses including a Copyright Law course as part of the standard curriculum. Often they will bring in experts and big names in the industry to discuss current topics that matter to the music biz.

One gentleman I met is Michael Harrington. He has been an expert witness in copyright and sampling cases involving the Dixie Chicks, Beastie Boys, 2 Live Crew. He gave a lecture at our school a few months ago about the current state of copyright. I attened the lecture planning on educating him about current technology and how the Internet works (most people in the industry don't have a clue). Come to find out he was already very educated on the subject; he is a member of EFF.

Anyway, check out his bio and an org he is a part of, the Belmont University Copyright Society. He is a very approachable guy and would probably appreciate an e-mail from our fellow /.'ers.

Here are the links:
http://www.belmont.edu/mb/profile.cfm?idno=369

http://www.belmontcopyright.com/

http://www.mtsu.edu/~record/facilities.html

Hm. I think the article was just attempting to highlight some often-overlooked contributions by the Barrons. I mean, I've never even heard of them, so I found it quite interesting.
The submitter is the one who seems to have goofed here, by presenting this short blurb as "The Birth of Electronic Music". The article itself makes no such claims; its focus is simply the Barrons.
If you do have an interest, there are plenty of great resources out there for one to peruse. Yes, Theremin was way ahead of his time, as was Cage, Schaeffer, and on and on.
For computer music in specific, look at Lejaren Hiller and Max Mathews. I had the great honor of meeting Max Mathews and man is he interesting. He was speaking to a class I was taking and he said "digital computer". Every time instead of saying computer, he said "digital computer". This confused me at first, but I thought about that and realized that he has a bit more perspective and history on these things and began working on analog computers.

The real question that you need to ask is what state of law most promotes the progress of science and of the arts. Sometimes it's to allow rapid innovation upon discovery, and sometimes it's to "protect" that discovery from being used competitively against the discoverer.

The projected gain by allowing people to copy your jumper prematurely may be negative, but to allow general jumper copying still allows an advantage in producing an original sufficient to allow plenty of innovations to take place (since you can advertise originality). The balance of cost and benefit, in the case of jumper manufacture is almost certainly of the side of copiers, although perhaps a better state of affairs would be to have an innovation tax on non-originators (increasing the price differential); a "default licence", if you will.

An explicit recognition of the incentives, and blocks to creativity would give us better laws. The view of having an absolute moral right to one's one work is one that is ignorant of the mechanism of creativity. I couldn't find the study, but a brain scan of creative types as against normal people shows that the former group make heavy use of memory in the process of creation. Thus "total originality" is a myth.

Now that there are so many digital recording formats, with various numbers of tracks, it is essentially impossible to create legacy recordings. Many programs we use today won't even run in 5 years let alone 100 and all we will have is basic 2 track mixdown masters of many records.

With tape you could use whatever you wanted to record a record, it all got put to the same tape and in most cases the tape lasted a very long time, 50 years plus. Better yet, often times the recording equipment was better than the tape playback so as time went on you could get better sound off the same tape because technology had advanced. Digital is locked in stone forever, never to reveal any improvements. Even as a crude 2nd step backup there is the potential to bounce your multi-track masters to multi-track tape for preservation.

Steve Albini, one of the world's best recording engineers has a good lecture about the importance of tape here

I first started using computers when my dad brought home our Kaypro 4MHz 8088. I learned DOS by watching over my dad's shoulder, and then trying to play games between when I got home from school and when he got home from work.

as far as teaching programming goes, try karel the robot that's what we used in high school before learning pascal, and it made the structures seem very logical.

function TurnRight(){
TurnLeft();
TurnLeft();
TurnLeft();
}

The volume of a gallon varies by temperature? That's a new one.

I thought liquids (of a given mass) changed volume very little in relation to temperature and pressure.

Leave your graduated cylinder at home -- It is illegal to pump gas into a non-approved container. A better idea would be to fit a flow meter on the end of the nozzle while you're filling your car. Then you can not only track discrepancies, but you can find out if the pump "makes up for it" at the 5- or 10-gallon mark.

This might work for diesel fuel which has a very low thermal expansion rate, but not for gasoline. Gasoline expands when it gets warm. Don't believe me? Fill your tank to the VERY top - to where you can see fuel in the filler neck. Then go park in the sun on a hot day. You will see fuel spilled all down the side of the car as the gasoline expands and overflows. You can see some of the math Here.

Karel is an introduction to c++. Basically, the object is a robot and you move him around and make him do stuff with beepers. Very simple programming.

The most complex thing I ever did was make a calculator. Since Karel doesn't have any arithmetic or variables (per se), it was a challenge.

Here are some fundamentals that describe the world a bit more.

I would think that Karel or one of its derivatives would give her a nice foundation in a simplified setting. Once comfortable, she can progress from there.

Another option might be trying Pascal. It depends on her background (math, reasoning, problem solving, etc.) She might also wish to take an intro programming course at her local community college.

Is that a Karel The Robot joke?

The PC/mac bit is obviously wrong, but the DX7 and MIDI bits seem correct.

According to this midi history, the first midi instrument showed up in december 1982, and the official midi spec was published in 1983.

BTW, Dave Smith, one of the fathers of MIDI (and creator of the famous Prophet 5), is still at it -- check out his latest synth, the Evolver, which is a wonderful combination of digital and analogue, and an utterly inspiring little box. Affordable too!

Funny you should ask that, since I used it in Mexico (I'm Mexican). It was the first programming tool in a course taught to children at the Galileo Institute. That was a programming school that got pretty big at around that time (something of a computer craze back then) and then disappeared AFAIK.

Also, when perusing through computer programming books about a year ago, I saw one that was about a new version of Karel, intended to teach object oriented programming. Just ran a search in google, and came up with this Karel homepage.

__

And here's a link (alas, no warranties, re: reliability).

Couldn't they get Karel the Robot to do this?

OK, he would have to do something with his beepers, and he is physically challenged (what with his inability to turn left), but still!

Farnham's Freehold by Heinlein is SciFi dystopia.

And if that doesn't suit your needs, this list might help:
http://www.mtsu.edu/~english/305/Accessories/utopi asdystopias.htm

Sortof like a modern, complex Karel in other words ;)

I strongly doubt these were posted on a lobby card with URLS embedded; nor does reposting the message with them gratuitously inserted add anything to the material.

Possibly not; it was an indulgence on my part. While it may not have added anything to the material, I don't think it detracted from it, either.

There are a lot of twenty-somethings and younger who read Slashdot, who may have never even heard of Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Edward Everett Horton, or even Cary Grant (whose closest still-living analog might be Sean Connery), all of them great entertainers.

It also gives Packard's message some historical context. In January of the same year, Benny Goodman had his triumphant jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. On 30 October, Orson Welles plunged the nation into panic with his famous War of The Worlds broadcast . And just a few days later, Kristallnacht took place, widely regarded as the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust.

So, no, I don't think adding the links was necessarily a bad thing. Of course, as the story's submitter, I'm biased... :-)

Schwab

Ah, but that leads to another problem in typical Judeo-Christian theology/philosophy. If G. existed before the universe, the G. exists outside the universe. If G. exists outside the universe, then the universe could act on G., making G. not perfect.

I'm much more inclined to agree with Spinoza -- basically that the universe is G., that G. is infinite in space as well as time (forward and backword), and G. doesn't decide anything, G. simply "is". Most Judeo-Christians really don't like this because it means that man is actually *part* of G., and that all the "evil" in the world is part of G. too, and that all the "mythological" type stuff (such as creation) in the Judeo-Christian world wouldn't work (especially if G. aka the universe has always existed).

When Einstein was asked by a reporter if he believed in G., he said he believed in Spinoza's G.

I'd highly recommend Spinoza's Ethics to anyone who wants to know more.

How do you figure?

Motion picture projectors use a two-bladed shutter. So for every frame of film, the screen is illuminated two times. This site has some cool background information on early film projection, and how it influenced television standards in the Olde Dayes.

What Jackson actually said was, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." Please note that name. Marshall was the first jurist to argue that the Supreme Court could review the actions of other branches of government. In 1830 this concept was still controversial. Now it's universally accepted. Recent presidents ignore the Court at their peril. Eisenhower enforced court orders he empahtically disagreed with. Nixon was forced to obey an order that cost him the Presidency. FDR, probably the most popular President in history, couldn't even get away with adding friendly judges to the court.

Read the linkked article. Your exact questions are answered in the FAQ.

To whit:

3 My mp3s are made from 16-bit CDs - why use a 24-bit decoder?

As you probably know, when you encode a CD to mp3 format, you don't store an exact copy of the original signal. When an mp3 is decoded, you don't get those original 16-bits back, but an approximation that should sound similar. When the decoder puts together all the elements held in the mp3 file, the arithmetical result can be very accurate in numerical terms, even if it's not exactly what was on the original CD. If you round it to 16-bits, you add a small amount of extra distortion to this reconstructed signal, getting even further away from what was on the original CD. If you round it to 24-bits, you're still adding distortion, but it's 256 times quieter than that added by rounding to 16-bits.

and,

4 I only have a 16-bit sound card - what use could a 24-bit decoder be?

If you calculate the result to 24-bit accuracy, and then round it to 16-bits, you gain nothing - the result will match all the standard 16-bit decoders. However, if you dither the result from 24-bits down to 16-bits, you can avoid all the distortion generated by rounding to 16-bits, and the result may sound better. Please read this article about dither for a fuller explanation of this.

This sounds tons more fun than that lame ass Karel the Robot baloney we had to go through in high school programming class. Forget the steeplechase, code up a deathchase!!!

I was in the search for an IDE, kdevelop was ok. But a cvs repository, wel make make files, a sane ANSI-C compiler like gcc -Wall -Werror -ansi and good old vim with syntax highlighting is a joy to work with.

My less than $0.02

Like: "If we're going to teach personal religious beliefs in the public schools, let's tell students what Jesus had to say against homosexuality: (a blank column, followed by) That's right: Absolutely Nothing! . . ."

Personally I don't see why they even bother to teach BS. Insertion sort, and selection sort are just as easy to comprehend, and much faster. Lots of people in my class had actually reinvented these before they were taught algorithms in class...

That said, I was also shown a video of sorting algorithms in CS class. The only thing that made the video worth watching was that the algorithms made all sorts of weird noises. We actually borrowed the tape from our teacher some years later, and had a good laugh watching it B) IIRC the soundtrack was made by Wendy Carlos.

http://www.mtsu.edu/~untch/karel/
http://ocweb.otterbein.edu /csc/cs115/web/karel/karel.htm

Karel is programmed in Pascal, which in turn is an API done in C. So a good way to proceed is have them master Karel, then program in Pascal, then C, then C++, Perl, Java, etc. My father once tried to teach me ALGOL and COBOL but being mainframe languages they were not very accessible. You can do a lot with just Pascal, however, and anyway the APCS test in highschool I took was in Pascal. After that, they'll either get into by themselves or just kinda lose interest in programming (like I did).

Consider that if Microsoft prevails here, /. will have to monitor all postings and censor them.

Actually, the strategy implied by Microsoft's letter would ensure that Slashdot does not need to monitor posts.

Microsoft's letter presumes that /. is a "service provider" under the DMCA. The point of Section 512(c) is to strike a compromise between two alternatives:

• Service providers have to constantly monitor all content on their sites and recognize copyright violation when they see it.
• Service providers are not responsible at all for copyright violations hosted on their sites.

If it weren't for this section of the DMCA, internet message boards like /. probably would have to monitor all content for copyright violation, which would make it prohibitively difficult for anyone to run one, as you suggest.

Following that last post, I decided that instead of continuing this flamewar indefinately, I'd actually do some quick research on the web. The following is what I pulled off the first few pages of Yahoo! and Hotbot when I searched for "LGN cortex".

Here: "The LGN organizes inputs from the retina, and slows them down before sending signals to the ocipital lobe (the visual cortex)."

Here: "Incoming sensory signals are not simply relayed to the cerebral cortex. Instead, these afferent signals are first actively gated and modified in the thalamus. Our research is focused on understanding the modulation of visual signals in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), the thalamic station in the pathway that subserves conscious visual perception. The LGN presents a single locus where vision, in a broad sense, can be impacted economically before visual signals are disseminated throughout the cortex. All subsequent cortical processing depends critically upon the nature of the signals that are conveyed by the LGN."

Here: "...to learn how information transmission from the retina to the visual cortex through the LGN is controlled."

This shows the information pathways involved in visual processing: retina-Pretectal area, retina-Superior Colliculus, retina-LGN and LGN-cortex.

There were others, but Netscape crashed (naturally) and I don't want to restep the entire search process.

Retina: I meant to check for info on retinal processing, but the search engines are clogged with retina simulators and other unhelpful pages. But I did find this which mentions the preprocessing of which I was speaking in my first post.

I read TBG before Neverness; fortunately, I read the two a few years apart so that TBG didn't ruin Neverness for me. Both are very good. I haven't finished the series yet; they're hard books to find.

Other SF authors in the same vein, writing literate SF, are the aforementioned Ia in Banks (make sure you consider this website), the well-known Ste phen R. Donaldson and Dan Simmons (in particular his Hyperion series). Iain Banks writes non-genre fiction as Iain M. Banks and is hugely popular in the UK. Donaldson, lambasted and praised for his Unbeliever Chronicles, also wrote The Gap Series, a dark DF space opera based on the Ring Cycle. Simmons writes a lot of horror and other dark fiction.

Another author in the vein is Steven Brust (whose Taltos series is his masterwork), as well as the other members of his writing circle, the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, including Emma Bull.

Another fine but relatively obscure author is the powerful writer George Alec Effinger. Lordy lordy, is this man good. If I'm not mistaken, he's also worked on comix with Neil Gaiman and wrote for the supercool SF cartoon Galaxy Rangers, along with another great author, Tom De Haven.

More old-school authors who wrote very post-modern SF include the amazing Avram Davidson (check out the great Treasury) who wrote primarily short stories, and the odd and great Polish author Stanislaw Lem (whose career began in 1951 and continues to this day). Starting from Lem, you get into the great European (including S. America) "fantastic philosophers" Borges and Calvino. And if you like them, then you're sure to like Pynchon, and so on to David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, who all write SF-tinged fiction.

And the list goes on.

er... RIT is NOT the only school with a BS/MS in IT... try MTSU (mtsu) they have one too... you didn't look long enough.