The first thing I'd teach him if he wants to learn programming is math. Real programming is heavily math oriented (In my opinion, to the point where language-specific knowledge is worthless since you ought to be able to pick it up quickly). Also, it was mentioned that he almost has his electronics associates degree. I don't know about the math level required for it, but I imagine it is quite trivial (You can go though a lot EE classes with nothing more than basic calculus knowledge). There are those that mentioned Knuth, but that probably isn't the best place to start. Understanding Knuth requires a massive math background (some of the problems in there are incredible complex and theoretical). Teach him calc (if he doesn't know it already), differential equations, linear algebra, real algebra (rings, groups, fields, etc), complex analysis (ESPECIALLY if he wants to do EE stuff).
As far as programming goes, I'd teach him Scheme before anything else. A lot of programmers start with languages such as C/Pascal/Java/etc and then find it incredibly difficult to go to languages such as Scheme. If you learn scheme first, however, it's quite easy to move to C/ASM/etc. I don't know how much of a JAVA proponent you are, but at least in my opinion, it ought to be used only for user interfaces.
And like everyone else has been saying, make sure he has a normal social life. All the "child prodigies" I've seen have been incredibly introverted and have few, if any social skills... also, if he truly is a prodigy, don't neglect the other subjects as well. English, history, foreign languages. I realize this is simply my opinion, but I don't really consider those that excel in just one area to be prodigies. Also, how much theoretical work is he doing? If it's all application based, then I would take another look at whether or not he really is a prodigy. It's not hard to fill a child up with enough knowledge for them to crank through problems, but if they aren't able to see the theory and make connections between things, then they amount to nothing more than an impressive human calculator.
The original concept behind was to prevent large states from having more influence than smaller ones, but not because of population differences. Since it was highly impractical for the candidates to campaign in those days, the electoral college was created to prevent people from simply voting for the candidate from their home state. Instead they voted for an elector to represent their state. On top of that the electors were originally required to cast two votes, one of which had to be from outside their state. yes, even at that time the number of electors was based on population, but it was not the driving factor behind using the electoral college.
Ok.. what I'd really like to know is why so many people seem to think that Nader is such a great guy. The man is SCUM. He is not only dishonest but a downright liar, a control freak, and probably a borderline psychopath.
Has he done some good for this country? Yes, but not as much as people would like to believe. Now most of what he does is use his consumer advocacy groups to amass wealth and power for hiimself. Did you realize that he has opposed and fought against such horrible things as whole milk, Volkswagen cars, fluorinated water, and the Elvis stamp!?! He routinely mistreats his own workers, and lies to cover his tracks at every corner.
So PLEASE will people stop supposrting this man and giving him more power that he certainly doesn't deserve.
For more info, PLEASE visit www.realchange.org/nader.htm. i didn't like nader much before I read the site, but after I read that page, even Pat Buchanan was higher on my list of politicians than Nader.
My only experiences with D.A.R.E. were when the class was taught to me in 5th grade. At the time, I found the class to be a complete waste of my time, since it mainly concentrated on demonizing drug use and instead of giving any actual information was primarily concerned with scaring us of jail time and ordering us to "Just say no".
And now, 10 years later, I have done alcohol, marijuana, LSD, and MDMA, (I am also now a smoker, which is something I tremendously regret), and I feel I am no worse off for it. Until I came to college, I had an incredible lack of proper information on the subject and wouldn't have been much more cautious about trying different substances.
The thing I see as the greatest problem with D.A.R.E. is the downplaying of the dangers of alochol, since they are mainly concerned with preventing underage drinking. In fact, however, alcohol is much worse for the human body than a lot of other drugs. It's simply been grandfathered into our society because it's been around for so long.
I believe that if people were simply given decent information on these substances (At sites such as Erowid.org and lycaeum.org (Lyceaum is much larger but poorly organized, Erowid is beautifully organized and a great place to start for real information on drugs)) that we would see an increase in "soft" drug use, but also a decease in hard drug use.
Of course, my personal belief is that the US should legalize ALL drugs, not just some. They should also retract any and all laws that govern crimes against ones self. (ie- Some state just recently outlawed sex toys.. what a complete load of BS). What people do in their own homes should be up to them. Granted, there should be laws governing their actions while on these substances (ie- things similar to drunk driving laws).
The results of making these drugs legal would mean 1) An increase in the quality of street drugs (which has been a problem with MDMA) 2) Would lead to a decrease in price 3) would eliminate the crime associated with illegal drug trafficing 4) Would create a new source of revenue for the US government, or the drug companies, while eliminating the need to spend trillions on the "War against drugs" 5) Would result in an overall more informed populace.
Of course we all know how wonderfully draconian the US government loves to be when deciding what its citizens are and aren't allowed to do to themselves. Isn't it a great society we live in? (Well, it's pretty decent, not great though, but it's the best the human race has come up with so far)
The current problem keeping LCD prices so high is not so much a lack of demand as it is a lack of an efficient manufacturing process.
Since LCDs are essentially a large array of pixels, each individual pixel is a potential failing point. If more than a very small number of pixels in a screen fail to operate properly, the entire screen has to be scrapped. On a screen with a resolution of 1024x768, you are talking 786432 pixels. By a very small number we are talking no more than 5-10 (if I remember correctly from when I last talked with someone), which means a failure rate of 0.00063 percent. Manufacturing with such high tolerances is quite difficult (in RAM production, yields in the mid-90 percent range are considered very good).
So ultimately there are a lot of screens that companies are spending money to produce that do not end up passing final test and need to be scrapped. The cost of all these scrapped screen is thus passed on to the consumer, which means higher prices on those screens that do pass. So what ultimately will need to happen for LCD prices to come down drastically is for the manufacturing to improve to where it is costing the companies very little to produce a working screen. As soon as that happens the prices will drop and they will become much more economically feasible for the average consumer.
Re:does echelon exist? does it matter?
on
Inside Echelon
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· Score: 1
Kind of off topic, but... Although Fort Knox may not have pop-up machine gun turrets, it does have an entire armored division (ie- tanks and attack helicopters) within a few minutes of the place. And last I checked they didn't give tours. Apparently stopped quite a few years back.
Re:What happened to the other 50%?
on
Caffeine Vault
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· Score: 1
That's why it's called the LD50- Lethal Dose for 50% of those that take that amount
Well, as you stated yourself, reducing the gate area you reduce the gate capacitance. Thus you can still achieve the same charging time, albeit with a smaller voltage.
And as for power consumption, yes, if you do full scaling where every part of the device is scaled down by some factor X then you get a reduction in power consumption. However, with the wonders of backwards compatibility and meeting external specs and such, oftentimes the devices are not scaled down using full scaling. In this case the voltage is kept the same and the device size reduced, which actually leads to higher power consumption.
Of course it reaches a point where the power consumption is just obscene, at which point they reduce the operating voltage. And this really isn't a problem if you're going to put out a new chipset for the processor, just dictate what the voltages have to be. However, if you're trying to build in compatibility for an older chipset that doesn't support the lower voltages your chip requires, your SOL.
Actually, I believe there is research going on right now into doing just that: Making chips that are optical instead of electric.
As for optical storage, I believe that exists as well in the form of holographic crystals.. 'm probably totally wrong on this, but what I remember was something along the lines of effectively writing a hologram into a crystal with a laser, and then being able to read it back using another laser.. supposed to yield insanely high memory densities, although I don't think they've solver the problem of memory degradation yet... and you'd still have to make it an electronic signal at some point.
It's all great and wonderful if they can construct devices that small, but the question is whether they will even work or not. Granted, the theoretical minimum device channel size is far below what is currently being produced (I think it's somewhere in the range of 0.02-0.05 microns, but don't quote me on that).
Another problem to look at is the degradation of the device that can take place when things get that small. I'm sure people wouldn't be so prone to overclocking their processors if there was a chance they might completely destroy the processor in doing so.
Another key, as was already stated, is that they need to bring the cost of the process down before it will ever see a production line. If the process requires a long time then it's likely to either create a bottleneck in the production line, reducing the overall output, or simply drive the price of the final product up a bit by forcing the company to purchase large numbers of the tool that performs the process.
Granted, the savings that would result from a smaller die size and potentially a correspondingly small package size could make up for the price difference due to the new tools. I'm not sure of the exact number, but a large part (>50% I believe) of the cost of the chip is in the packaging (Which is why you'll find bins of scrapped wafers at any production plant.. why package something that isn't going to work)
Another problem I could see in bringing the process to market is in contamination of the chips during production. As it stands now, lots of chips are scrapped because of skin cells, dust, etc landing on them during their trip down the line. With the smaller device size the smallest foreign particle size that could be tolerated would have to be smaller... so either clean rooms would have to get cleaner and their employees more religious in following the rules, or they would have to find some way to isolate the wafers from the technicians.
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As far as programming goes, I'd teach him Scheme before anything else. A lot of programmers start with languages such as C/Pascal/Java/etc and then find it incredibly difficult to go to languages such as Scheme. If you learn scheme first, however, it's quite easy to move to C/ASM/etc. I don't know how much of a JAVA proponent you are, but at least in my opinion, it ought to be used only for user interfaces.
And like everyone else has been saying, make sure he has a normal social life. All the "child prodigies" I've seen have been incredibly introverted and have few, if any social skills... also, if he truly is a prodigy, don't neglect the other subjects as well. English, history, foreign languages. I realize this is simply my opinion, but I don't really consider those that excel in just one area to be prodigies. Also, how much theoretical work is he doing? If it's all application based, then I would take another look at whether or not he really is a prodigy. It's not hard to fill a child up with enough knowledge for them to crank through problems, but if they aren't able to see the theory and make connections between things, then they amount to nothing more than an impressive human calculator.
The original concept behind was to prevent large states from having more influence than smaller ones, but not because of population differences. Since it was highly impractical for the candidates to campaign in those days, the electoral college was created to prevent people from simply voting for the candidate from their home state. Instead they voted for an elector to represent their state. On top of that the electors were originally required to cast two votes, one of which had to be from outside their state. yes, even at that time the number of electors was based on population, but it was not the driving factor behind using the electoral college.
Has he done some good for this country? Yes, but not as much as people would like to believe. Now most of what he does is use his consumer advocacy groups to amass wealth and power for hiimself. Did you realize that he has opposed and fought against such horrible things as whole milk, Volkswagen cars, fluorinated water, and the Elvis stamp!?! He routinely mistreats his own workers, and lies to cover his tracks at every corner.
So PLEASE will people stop supposrting this man and giving him more power that he certainly doesn't deserve.
For more info, PLEASE visit www.realchange.org/nader.htm. i didn't like nader much before I read the site, but after I read that page, even Pat Buchanan was higher on my list of politicians than Nader.
And now, 10 years later, I have done alcohol, marijuana, LSD, and MDMA, (I am also now a smoker, which is something I tremendously regret), and I feel I am no worse off for it. Until I came to college, I had an incredible lack of proper information on the subject and wouldn't have been much more cautious about trying different substances.
The thing I see as the greatest problem with D.A.R.E. is the downplaying of the dangers of alochol, since they are mainly concerned with preventing underage drinking. In fact, however, alcohol is much worse for the human body than a lot of other drugs. It's simply been grandfathered into our society because it's been around for so long. I believe that if people were simply given decent information on these substances (At sites such as Erowid.org and lycaeum.org (Lyceaum is much larger but poorly organized, Erowid is beautifully organized and a great place to start for real information on drugs)) that we would see an increase in "soft" drug use, but also a decease in hard drug use.
Of course, my personal belief is that the US should legalize ALL drugs, not just some. They should also retract any and all laws that govern crimes against ones self. (ie- Some state just recently outlawed sex toys.. what a complete load of BS). What people do in their own homes should be up to them. Granted, there should be laws governing their actions while on these substances (ie- things similar to drunk driving laws).
The results of making these drugs legal would mean 1) An increase in the quality of street drugs (which has been a problem with MDMA) 2) Would lead to a decrease in price 3) would eliminate the crime associated with illegal drug trafficing 4) Would create a new source of revenue for the US government, or the drug companies, while eliminating the need to spend trillions on the "War against drugs" 5) Would result in an overall more informed populace.
Of course we all know how wonderfully draconian the US government loves to be when deciding what its citizens are and aren't allowed to do to themselves. Isn't it a great society we live in? (Well, it's pretty decent, not great though, but it's the best the human race has come up with so far)
Since LCDs are essentially a large array of pixels, each individual pixel is a potential failing point. If more than a very small number of pixels in a screen fail to operate properly, the entire screen has to be scrapped. On a screen with a resolution of 1024x768, you are talking 786432 pixels. By a very small number we are talking no more than 5-10 (if I remember correctly from when I last talked with someone), which means a failure rate of 0.00063 percent. Manufacturing with such high tolerances is quite difficult (in RAM production, yields in the mid-90 percent range are considered very good).
So ultimately there are a lot of screens that companies are spending money to produce that do not end up passing final test and need to be scrapped. The cost of all these scrapped screen is thus passed on to the consumer, which means higher prices on those screens that do pass. So what ultimately will need to happen for LCD prices to come down drastically is for the manufacturing to improve to where it is costing the companies very little to produce a working screen. As soon as that happens the prices will drop and they will become much more economically feasible for the average consumer.
Kind of off topic, but... Although Fort Knox may not have pop-up machine gun turrets, it does have an entire armored division (ie- tanks and attack helicopters) within a few minutes of the place. And last I checked they didn't give tours. Apparently stopped quite a few years back.
That's why it's called the LD50- Lethal Dose for 50% of those that take that amount
Well, as you stated yourself, reducing the gate area you reduce the gate capacitance. Thus you can still achieve the same charging time, albeit with a smaller voltage.
And as for power consumption, yes, if you do full scaling where every part of the device is scaled down by some factor X then you get a reduction in power consumption. However, with the wonders of backwards compatibility and meeting external specs and such, oftentimes the devices are not scaled down using full scaling. In this case the voltage is kept the same and the device size reduced, which actually leads to higher power consumption.
Of course it reaches a point where the power consumption is just obscene, at which point they reduce the operating voltage. And this really isn't a problem if you're going to put out a new chipset for the processor, just dictate what the voltages have to be. However, if you're trying to build in compatibility for an older chipset that doesn't support the lower voltages your chip requires, your SOL.
Actually, I believe there is research going on right now into doing just that: Making chips that are optical instead of electric.
As for optical storage, I believe that exists as well in the form of holographic crystals.. 'm probably totally wrong on this, but what I remember was something along the lines of effectively writing a hologram into a crystal with a laser, and then being able to read it back using another laser.. supposed to yield insanely high memory densities, although I don't think they've solver the problem of memory degradation yet... and you'd still have to make it an electronic signal at some point.
It's all great and wonderful if they can construct devices that small, but the question is whether they will even work or not. Granted, the theoretical minimum device channel size is far below what is currently being produced (I think it's somewhere in the range of 0.02-0.05 microns, but don't quote me on that).
Another problem to look at is the degradation of the device that can take place when things get that small. I'm sure people wouldn't be so prone to overclocking their processors if there was a chance they might completely destroy the processor in doing so.
Another key, as was already stated, is that they need to bring the cost of the process down before it will ever see a production line. If the process requires a long time then it's likely to either create a bottleneck in the production line, reducing the overall output, or simply drive the price of the final product up a bit by forcing the company to purchase large numbers of the tool that performs the process.
Granted, the savings that would result from a smaller die size and potentially a correspondingly small package size could make up for the price difference due to the new tools. I'm not sure of the exact number, but a large part (>50% I believe) of the cost of the chip is in the packaging (Which is why you'll find bins of scrapped wafers at any production plant.. why package something that isn't going to work)
Another problem I could see in bringing the process to market is in contamination of the chips during production. As it stands now, lots of chips are scrapped because of skin cells, dust, etc landing on them during their trip down the line. With the smaller device size the smallest foreign particle size that could be tolerated would have to be smaller... so either clean rooms would have to get cleaner and their employees more religious in following the rules, or they would have to find some way to isolate the wafers from the technicians.