What is really scary about this is that only a few years ago scientists were saying that the Arctic "could be ice free in summer before the end of the century" and the deniers were calling them alarmists THEN. Then in the last couple of years some of the most alarmist of these alarmists have been saying that the Arctic could be ice free in summer in the next couple of decades.
Now I look at the slope of the line on that chart and I think the Arctic is going to be to be pretty close to ice free THIS summer.
The Arctic sea ice is showing us how much more rapidly things can change than even the "worst alarmists" dare to predict when positive feedback loops kick in and tipping points are passed. What will be the ripple effects of this? Where is the next tipping point?
But the Rupublicans are against Network Neutrality (because they consider it excessive regulation) and without Network Neutrality as a base none of the other Internet Freedoms can actually exist because there is market action to push for more freedoms, only the infrastructure owning corporations natural desire for more control.
Network Neutrality is the first and key requirement for all other freedoms on the Internet. It is what makes the Internet the peer-to-peer system it was designed to be. Without some basic government regulation to ensure that the big peers (Telcos, etc.) don't simply bully the little peers (you and me) or completely take away our "peerness", all talk about Internet freedoms is totally empty.
Romney is on record as being against Nework Neutrality.
Kickstarter is not meant to replace venture capitalism... it is an alternative to venture capital for types of projects which wouldn't be attractive to capitalist investors, such as art projects, or very small scale manufacturing, or as in this case, projects that venture capitalists might consider unrealistic but in which enthusiasts might have enough faith. Those who contribute don't do it for a "trinket"... we do it either because we simply want to see the project succeed, or because we want the product enough to pay for it in advance and take the chance that it'll never materialize.
Kickstarter is filling a needed niche... Iit's a large niche, and it seems to be working. And it it works for enough types of things, it'll start inspiring venture investors to go after some of the same markets, which will mean that it's "working" in yet another sense for society.
So I think Kickstart is a brilliant idea. We'll have to wait a bit longer to see if history will vindicate it, but early indications from recent successes are that it may be a real game changer.
I just thought that would be a better headline. Dark matter is actually the hypothesized solution to the missing mass problem. And it was supposed to be "right here"...
'What I do not understand is — had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid — why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent..."
The fundamental problem with this guy's argument, and with patents in general, is that aforementioned megarich corporations DID invent this technology... regardless of whether the Eolas patent was valid by today's standards of what is patentable or not, Google, Yahoo and others sure as hell DID NOT COPY this technology from Eolas, their own engineers invented it, even if they were not the first to invent it.
The problem with the whole idea behind patents is that almost any technology is easy to invent once you put your mind to it, but with patents you basically should not put your mind to it, you should first hire an army of attorneys to read all the possibly relevant patents to find if someone has already "invented" it and then license it from them. Then, if you can't find it in existing patents, you can try inventing it, right? But many patents are so obfuscatedly written you could read them 10 times and not realize that they cover exactly what you're looking for.
Indeed, that was a misuse of a Latin abbreviation, i.e. "i.e.". What I really wanted was a way of abbreviating "for example", e.g. "e.g.". Thanks! I think I've learned it now.
"'This study is among the first to show animals incorporating a chemical defence as a response to the threat of predation,' says Professor Mark Elgar of the University of Melbourne."
That sentence is absurd coming from a biologist... either it's a misquote, or this professor smoked some strong stuff... Biology is FULL of chemical defences as a response to the threat of predation, and chemical offences for that matter. They are common in the insect world, and practically universal in the plant and microbial worlds. In fact looking at Biology as a whole, the majority of what evolution does on a day-to-day basis is developing new chemical defences as a response to the threat of predation. Perhaps repellents are a little more unusual in the animal (as opposed to plant) world or less well studied, but hasn't he ever heard of i.e. skunks? By the time we narrow this sentence down to something that makes sense it's a big yawner: "This study is amongst the first to show animals incorporating a chemical repellent targeted at specific predators into secretions they use to build external structures (webs)." Hmmm.
They keep saying that PC's are going to be replaced by: set-top boxes, game consoles, smart-phones, etc. But the moment any of these devices are advanced enough to replace the personal computer they ARE the personal computer.
That's why in the end the only thing that will truly replace the PC is another PC. Doh.
This is really just the logical continuation of our throw-away consume society. Yes, the shop that made this "drive" is committing fraud, but it's just a small step further than most consumer products made by big companies today. Like DVD players that come with firmware that's so buggy that they basically don't work (like one Sony model I bought some years ago) or cellphones that crash 20% of the time when a call comes in (like all 4 of the Nokia 1616s I recently bought).
More and more the products we buy don't really work, or work just long enough that we don't notice how broken they are before we buy the next one because the fashion (or technology) has moved on.
These Chinese con men are really just embracing the highest credo of modern capitalism... profit above product. Can you blame them?
The/. post said $200 for a 1W laser... dunno where he got that idea, the wicked lasers site has the Spyder III for $200 for the 50 mW version, a 500 mW version, which seems to be the max they are selling, is $3000! I'd love to have one, but it will have to wait for Christmas, I guess.
I'm not basing my opinion on the comments, I was just pointing to them as examples. And while people may not like to admit that they "acted like pricks" even when they realize it, you don't really have any reason to think that anybody participated in this discussion ever did so.
Folks this "Google-itis" behavior can't be that common precisely because people don't want to look like idiots in front of their doctors or others. Sure there have always been hypochondriacs, and today they are armed with Google which makes them even more annoying to Doctors. But pretty much, that's all there is to this.
Google U? WTF? Look, people with political or religious agendas have always managed to find or manufacture information that supports their viewpoint, this has nothing to do with Google or even the Internet.
As for ignorance and dark ages... long before the Internet there were anti-vacciners, and flat-earthers, and black helicopter conspiracy nuts. But looking at your sig, I have to tell you... there *is* one thing moving is back to the dark ages, and that's the piecemeal enclosure of the noosphere by so-called "intellectual property".
Ok, I don't have any hard data, but it seems to me that in reality today for every patient with mis-informed "Googleitis" there are ten or more people who are getting better medical care because they are informed about their condition or even have already correctly self-diagnosed. Some of the comments right here to point.
But doctors are upset because they are not used to having informed patients. They are used being the godlike arbitors of secret knowledge whose judgement will be trusted 100% because of their degree. But in reality of course they are human and all too fallible, and even more so nowadays that they are increasingly simply pharmaceutical salesmen rather than healers and don't really have or take the time to actually know their patients.
Before doctors found it easy to be confident... because hardly anyone ever questioned them. Now things are getting a bit more difficult. Poor doctors? I'm finding it difficult to be sympathetic.
There may be a lot of information of questionable quality on the Net, but overall I have not a shred of doubt that the empowerment the Net has brought to the individual in this regard has been a boon to public health.
So Wikimedia Commons is being overwhelmed by porn, the way Usenet was 10-15 years ago, right? Well, I'd love to see some of it, but I can't seem to find it. A search for "porn" turns up i.e. pictures of pornographic actresses, almost all clothed (an occasional one topless). "Pussy" turns up some pictures of pussycats, "teats" turns up nothing because people can't spell, "tits" and "penis" finds some stuff that's highly anatomical, "fucking" gives as its top result a fucking couple... of flies! In short, if there's any porn in Wikimedia, it's less than 1 in a million.
It seems to be all just Jimmy Wales trying to get some publicity and one-upping Larry Sanger. The whole thing is even more pathetic than Larry Sanger's original fantasy-rant.
Folks, this has nothing to do with Asian vs. Western culture in general. This is about one thing, very specificially... WITHIN the framework of modern Western society (which dominates the whole world today, including China) China's government has been more heavily promoting and rewarding success in education and research, whereas the Western governments largely reward and promote success in business. Both do what they do without any regard to ethics. The result in China is lying and cheating in academia. The result in the West is lying and cheating in business, which in its milder forms is known as marketing and has become so entrenched that it isn't even considered unethical anymore. In its more severe forms, which are equally pervasive, it leads to Enrons, Maddocks, industries totally dominated by monoplies, etc.
Of the 3 executives who were convicted only one could be called an "italian exec" (former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes), the other two are David Drummond (Google's top lawyer) and Peter Fleischer (looks like he's an exec in charge of privacy) and are based in California.
I am waiting for the 8' diameter tree with a height of 20 feet gown in 10 years to be published )
No GMO necessary, it already exists... it is called Eucalyptus, and some species will reach those dimensions in rather less than 10 years in the right climate. It is nowadays grown in vast quantities for paper and construction (although for construction they drown it in poison after harvest because most wood-eating insects seem to think it's delicious.) I live in an area of Brazil that used to be rainforest of which now only patches are left, the rest is all eucalyptus plantations owned by one large paper factory and which together cover abpout the same area as a smaller European country.
A few cycles of planting and harvesting eucalyptus in monoculture is also an excellent way to make the soil totally unsuitable for growing anything else, and lowering the water table to boot. Eucalyptus digs deep, but eventually it will bring the water table down below its own reach, then you can forget about growing/anything/ on that land for while and even your neighbors who weren't planting Eucalyptus will be suffering.
Since large scale eucalyptus plantations outside of Australia are a relatively new thing, the scope of this particular idocy hasn't hit home yet in most places, although I hear that Southern Portugal is getting close to disaster stage already.
Mind you, I love eucalyptus, I think it is a wonderful tree... after all it's not a fault that it grows so fast and is so good at extracting the resources it needs to grow even out of poorer soil. But the big thing agro-industry (and civilization, which currently depends on it) is in denial about is that monoculture is NEVER sustainable. It will always result in a lopsided depletion of "soil resources" that can't be fixed simply by adding NPK fertilizer. Monoculture is the mining of soil fertility, and eucalyptus monoculture is some very fast and efficient mining at that.:j
Yes, Linus is worth of consideration, not only for his own achievements but also for what he symbolizes in the fight against Intellectual Monopoly. This is one of the great fights of our times... and the wealth-grab of widening intellectual monopoly is part of what makes the rich (nations) richer and the poor poorer. Nominating Linus for the Nobel Peace Price would draw needed attention to this fight.
Linux is an equalizer for the poor. I am involved in a project in Brazil where we take old (and usually broken) donated machines show local kids how to rebuild them and put linux on them. Dozens of kids who would not otherwise have been able to afford a computer or learn about technology have benefited from this. And there are thousands of such projects around the world, having made a huge difference at the grass-roots in many communities.
Microsoft might not want to "fend off" some legal attacks... by paying a settlement, which they can easily do, they give the trolls the means to attack others who might NOT be able to afford a settlement, thus clearing the battlefield, err, market, for Microsoft's products.
I have no idea if this applies here, but this isn't cynicism... Corporations DO think this way. There is no morality involved, only the logic of competition in the markets, and there are no questions of legality, only those of court and settlement costs vs potential profits.
The author of TFA suggests Python... and I would concur if I thought language was really the important thing. But it isn't... what matters much more is HOW you teach programming. Python *is* interesting in that you could re-write SICP ("The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", the Scheme-based MIT intro text) to use Python, or you could teach the "intro to data structures in Pascal" course I took my first year in college (1985) using Python. It's a nice, clean language that adapts well to almost any programming paradigm.
But the real question is, are you going to use the SICP approach or the more typical procedural programming and data structures approach to teach (maybe with some superficial OOP thrown in)? You can do the former in LISP, ML, Python, and many other dynamic languages. You can do the later using basically any major programming language; nowadays Universities tend to use either Java or C++, although the aforementioned dynamic languages could be used as well.
The former will presumably give you better programmers, but a much smaller percentage of entrants will survive the first year. So it's a quality vs. quantity thing, but the answer is by no means clear-cut... many of those who wouldn't make it through a first year of SICP could still become excellent programmers after a few years of a more procedural approach. And many of those who'd excel at an SICP course might get too bored with the tedium of most large scale programming to ever become software engineers, prefering instead to go into academic CS or other sciences.
The bottom line is, it isn't language that matters but how concrete or abstract the concepts that you're learning first are. Do higher levels of abstraction make for better software engineering? Probably, but in a real software project it doesn't help you that the design is beautiful if you can't find enough people who understand it to implement it. Let's be honest... what percentage of working programmers even really groks recursion, never mind anonymous first-order functions or metaobject protocols?
On the flip side there are those (like Paul Graham) that have argued that if you use higher level abstractions and a programming language that can express them, you only need 1/10th as many programmers. But I think only 1/100th of programmers today are capable of it, so that leaves us with a large deficit.
I don't know about that. Man is exceptionally good at least at producing if not controlling destructive forces. According to Wikipedia ("Megaton"), the 1960 Chilean earthquake (the largest ever recorded) released energies equivalent to 60,000 Gigatons of TNT. That was a 9.5, but since 2 steps on the logarithmic Richter scale are equivalent to a factor of 1000 in energy released, that means a 7.5 quake is only about 60 Gigatons equivalent, which is rather less than the destructive power of the world's nuclear arsenal. Just the US alone has nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons (fas.org), a good portion of which are 30 Megaton equivalents.
So the nuclear weapons we already have are plenty to cause the forces released by a big earthquake, although not for the very biggest earthquakes. But the difference is only a factor of a few hundred, surely we could build a couple of million big bombs if really wanted to...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
What is really scary about this is that only a few years ago scientists were saying that the Arctic "could be ice free in summer before the end of the century" and the deniers were calling them alarmists THEN. Then in the last couple of years some of the most alarmist of these alarmists have been saying that the Arctic could be ice free in summer in the next couple of decades.
Now I look at the slope of the line on that chart and I think the Arctic is going to be to be pretty close to ice free THIS summer.
The Arctic sea ice is showing us how much more rapidly things can change than even the "worst alarmists" dare to predict when positive feedback loops kick in and tipping points are passed. What will be the ripple effects of this? Where is the next tipping point?
But the Rupublicans are against Network Neutrality (because they consider it excessive regulation) and without Network Neutrality as a base none of the other Internet Freedoms can actually exist because there is market action to push for more freedoms, only the infrastructure owning corporations natural desire for more control.
Network Neutrality is the first and key requirement for all other freedoms on the Internet. It is what makes the Internet the peer-to-peer system it was designed to be. Without some basic government regulation to ensure that the big peers (Telcos, etc.) don't simply bully the little peers (you and me) or completely take away our "peerness", all talk about Internet freedoms is totally empty.
Romney is on record as being against Nework Neutrality.
Kickstarter is not meant to replace venture capitalism... it is an alternative to venture capital for types of projects which wouldn't be attractive to capitalist investors, such as art projects, or very small scale manufacturing, or as in this case, projects that venture capitalists might consider unrealistic but in which enthusiasts might have enough faith. Those who contribute don't do it for a "trinket"... we do it either because we simply want to see the project succeed, or because we want the product enough to pay for it in advance and take the chance that it'll never materialize.
Kickstarter is filling a needed niche... Iit's a large niche, and it seems to be working. And it it works for enough types of things, it'll start inspiring venture investors to go after some of the same markets, which will mean that it's "working" in yet another sense for society.
So I think Kickstart is a brilliant idea. We'll have to wait a bit longer to see if history will vindicate it, but early indications from recent successes are that it may be a real game changer.
They pre-fab even the foundation. Seriously. You can see it in this video this video of them (BSB) erecting a 30-story hotel in 15 days.
I just thought that would be a better headline. Dark matter is actually the hypothesized solution to the missing mass problem. And it was supposed to be "right here"...
'What I do not understand is — had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid — why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent ..."
The fundamental problem with this guy's argument, and with patents in general, is that aforementioned megarich corporations DID invent this technology... regardless of whether the Eolas patent was valid by today's standards of what is patentable or not, Google, Yahoo and others sure as hell DID NOT COPY this technology from Eolas, their own engineers invented it, even if they were not the first to invent it.
The problem with the whole idea behind patents is that almost any technology is easy to invent once you put your mind to it, but with patents you basically should not put your mind to it, you should first hire an army of attorneys to read all the possibly relevant patents to find if someone has already "invented" it and then license it from them. Then, if you can't find it in existing patents, you can try inventing it, right? But many patents are so obfuscatedly written you could read them 10 times and not realize that they cover exactly what you're looking for.
Indeed, that was a misuse of a Latin abbreviation, i.e. "i.e.". What I really wanted
was a way of abbreviating "for example", e.g. "e.g.". Thanks! I think I've learned it now.
"'This study is among the first to show animals incorporating a chemical defence as a response to the threat of predation,' says Professor Mark Elgar of the University of Melbourne."
That sentence is absurd coming from a biologist... either it's a misquote, or this professor smoked some strong stuff... Biology is FULL of chemical defences as a response to the threat of predation, and chemical offences for that matter. They are common in the insect world, and practically universal in the plant and microbial worlds. In fact looking at Biology as a whole, the majority of what evolution does on a day-to-day basis is developing new chemical defences as a response to the threat of predation. Perhaps repellents are a little more unusual in the animal (as opposed to plant) world or less well studied, but hasn't he ever heard of i.e. skunks? By the time we narrow this sentence down to something that makes sense it's a big yawner: "This study is amongst the first to show animals incorporating a chemical repellent targeted at specific predators into secretions they use to build external structures (webs)." Hmmm.
If you don't speak SMTP as a second language you probably shouldn't have that feature.
*grin*
...indistinguishable from a PC.
They keep saying that PC's are going to be replaced by: set-top boxes, game consoles, smart-phones, etc. But the moment any of these devices are advanced enough to replace the personal computer they ARE the personal computer.
That's why in the end the only thing that will truly replace the PC is another PC. Doh.
This is really just the logical continuation of our throw-away consume society. Yes, the shop that made this "drive" is committing fraud, but it's just a small step further than most consumer products made by big companies today. Like DVD players that come with firmware that's so buggy that they basically don't work (like one Sony model I bought some years ago) or cellphones that crash 20% of the time when a call comes in (like all 4 of the Nokia 1616s I recently bought).
More and more the products we buy don't really work, or work just long enough that we don't notice how broken they are before we buy the next one because the fashion (or technology) has moved on.
These Chinese con men are really just embracing the highest credo of modern capitalism... profit above product. Can you blame them?
You've heard of WORM (write once read many), now we have WARN (write
always, read never).
The /. post said $200 for a 1W laser... dunno where he got that idea, the wicked lasers site has the Spyder III for $200 for the 50 mW version, a 500 mW version, which seems to be the max they are selling, is $3000! I'd love to have one, but it will have to wait for Christmas, I guess.
I'm not basing my opinion on the comments, I was just pointing to them as examples. And while people may not like to admit that they "acted like pricks" even when they realize it, you don't really have any reason to think that anybody participated in this discussion ever did so.
Folks this "Google-itis" behavior can't be that common precisely because people don't want to look like idiots in front of their doctors or others. Sure there have always been hypochondriacs, and today they are armed with Google which makes them even more annoying to Doctors. But pretty much, that's all there is to this.
Google U? WTF? Look, people with political or religious agendas have always managed to find or manufacture information that supports their viewpoint, this has nothing to do with Google or even the Internet.
As for ignorance and dark ages... long before the Internet there were anti-vacciners, and flat-earthers, and black helicopter conspiracy nuts. But looking at your sig, I have to tell you... there *is* one thing moving is back to the dark ages, and that's the piecemeal enclosure of the noosphere by so-called "intellectual property".
Ok, I don't have any hard data, but it seems to me that in reality today for every patient with mis-informed "Googleitis" there are ten or more people who are getting better medical care because they are informed about their condition or even have already correctly self-diagnosed. Some of the comments right here to point.
But doctors are upset because they are not used to having informed patients. They are used being the godlike arbitors of secret knowledge whose judgement will be trusted 100% because of their degree. But in reality of course they are human and all too fallible, and even more so nowadays that they are increasingly simply pharmaceutical salesmen rather than healers and don't really have or take the time to actually know their patients.
Before doctors found it easy to be confident... because hardly anyone ever questioned them. Now things are getting a bit more difficult. Poor doctors? I'm finding it difficult to be sympathetic.
There may be a lot of information of questionable quality on the Net, but overall I have not a shred of doubt that the empowerment the Net has brought to the individual in this regard has been a boon to public health.
You know what happens to people who say "gosh" and "darn" after they die?
They burn in heck...
(attributed to some comedian, no idea who)
So Wikimedia Commons is being overwhelmed by porn, the way Usenet was 10-15 years ago, right? Well, I'd love to see some of it, but I can't seem to find it. A search for "porn" turns up i.e. pictures of pornographic actresses, almost all clothed (an occasional one topless). "Pussy" turns up some pictures of pussycats, "teats" turns up nothing because people can't spell, "tits" and "penis" finds some stuff that's highly anatomical, "fucking" gives as its top result a fucking couple... of flies! In short, if there's any porn in Wikimedia, it's less than 1 in a million.
It seems to be all just Jimmy Wales trying to get some publicity and one-upping Larry Sanger. The whole thing is even more pathetic than Larry Sanger's original fantasy-rant.
Alright people, nothing to see here...
Folks, this has nothing to do with Asian vs. Western culture in general. This is about one thing, very specificially... WITHIN the framework of modern Western society (which dominates the whole world today, including China) China's government has been more heavily promoting and rewarding success in education and research, whereas the Western governments largely reward and promote success in business. Both do what they do without any regard to ethics. The result in China is lying and cheating in academia. The result in the West is lying and cheating in business, which in its milder forms is known as marketing and has become so entrenched that it isn't even considered unethical anymore. In its more severe forms, which are equally pervasive, it leads to Enrons, Maddocks, industries totally dominated by monoplies, etc.
Simple and obvious.
Of the 3 executives who were convicted only one could be called an "italian exec" (former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes), the other two are David Drummond (Google's top lawyer) and Peter Fleischer (looks like he's an exec in charge of privacy) and are based in California.
I am waiting for the 8' diameter tree with a height of 20 feet gown in 10 years to be published )
No GMO necessary, it already exists... it is called Eucalyptus, and some species will reach those dimensions in rather less than 10 years in the right climate. It is nowadays grown in vast quantities for paper and construction (although for construction they drown it in poison after harvest because most wood-eating insects seem to think it's delicious.) I live in an area of Brazil that used to be rainforest of which now only patches are left, the rest is all eucalyptus plantations owned by one large paper factory and which together cover abpout the same area as a smaller European country.
A few cycles of planting and harvesting eucalyptus in monoculture is also an excellent way to make the soil totally unsuitable for growing anything else, and lowering the water table to boot. Eucalyptus digs deep, but eventually it will bring the water table down below its own reach, then you can forget about growing /anything/ on that land for while and even your neighbors who weren't planting Eucalyptus will be suffering.
Since large scale eucalyptus plantations outside of Australia are a relatively new thing, the scope of this particular idocy hasn't hit home yet in most places, although I hear that Southern Portugal is getting close to disaster stage already.
Mind you, I love eucalyptus, I think it is a wonderful tree... after all it's not a fault that it grows so fast and is so good at extracting the resources it needs to grow even out of poorer soil. But the big thing agro-industry (and civilization, which currently depends on it) is in denial about is that monoculture is NEVER sustainable. It will always result in a lopsided depletion of "soil resources" that can't be fixed simply by adding NPK fertilizer. Monoculture is the mining of soil fertility, and eucalyptus monoculture is some very fast and efficient mining at that. :j
Yes, Linus is worth of consideration, not only for his own achievements but also for what he symbolizes in the fight against Intellectual Monopoly. This is one of the great fights of our times... and the wealth-grab of widening intellectual monopoly is part of what makes the rich (nations) richer and the poor poorer. Nominating Linus for the Nobel Peace Price would draw needed attention to this fight.
Linux is an equalizer for the poor. I am involved in a project in Brazil where we take old (and usually broken) donated machines show local kids how to rebuild them and put linux on them. Dozens of kids who would not otherwise have been able to afford a computer or learn about technology have benefited from this. And there are thousands of such projects around the world, having made a huge difference at the grass-roots in many communities.
I heartily support Linus's nomination!
Microsoft might not want to "fend off" some legal attacks... by paying a settlement, which they can easily do, they give the trolls the means to attack others who might NOT be able to afford a settlement, thus clearing the battlefield, err, market, for Microsoft's products.
I have no idea if this applies here, but this isn't cynicism... Corporations DO think this way. There is no morality involved, only the logic of competition in the markets, and there are no questions of legality, only those of court and settlement costs vs potential profits.
The author of TFA suggests Python... and I would concur if I thought language was really the important thing. But it isn't... what matters much more is HOW you teach programming. Python *is* interesting in that you could re-write SICP ("The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", the Scheme-based MIT intro text) to use Python, or you could teach the "intro to data structures in Pascal" course I took my first year in college (1985) using Python. It's a nice, clean language that adapts well to almost any programming paradigm.
But the real question is, are you going to use the SICP approach or the more typical procedural programming and data structures approach to teach (maybe with some superficial OOP thrown in)? You can do the former in LISP, ML, Python, and many other dynamic languages. You can do the later using basically any major programming language; nowadays Universities tend to use either Java or C++, although the aforementioned dynamic languages could be used as well.
The former will presumably give you better programmers, but a much smaller percentage of entrants will survive the first year. So it's a quality vs. quantity thing, but the answer is by no means clear-cut... many of those who wouldn't make it through a first year of SICP could still become excellent programmers after a few years of a more procedural approach. And many of those who'd excel at an SICP course might get too bored with the tedium of most large scale programming to ever become software engineers, prefering instead to go into academic CS or other sciences.
The bottom line is, it isn't language that matters but how concrete or abstract the concepts that you're learning first are. Do higher levels of abstraction make for better software engineering? Probably, but in a real software project it doesn't help you that the design is beautiful if you can't find enough people who understand it to implement it. Let's be honest... what percentage of working programmers even really groks recursion, never mind anonymous first-order functions or metaobject protocols?
On the flip side there are those (like Paul Graham) that have argued that if you use higher level abstractions and a programming language that can express them, you only need 1/10th as many programmers. But I think only 1/100th of programmers today are capable of it, so that leaves us with a large deficit.
Rambling on, :j
I don't know about that. Man is exceptionally good at least at producing if not controlling destructive forces. According to Wikipedia ("Megaton"), the 1960 Chilean earthquake (the largest ever recorded) released energies equivalent to 60,000 Gigatons of TNT. That was a 9.5, but since 2 steps on the logarithmic Richter scale are equivalent to a factor of 1000 in energy released, that means a 7.5 quake is only about 60 Gigatons equivalent, which is rather less than the destructive power of the world's nuclear arsenal. Just the US alone has nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons (fas.org), a good portion of which are 30 Megaton equivalents.
So the nuclear weapons we already have are plenty to cause the forces released by a big earthquake, although not for the very biggest earthquakes. But the difference is only a factor of a few hundred, surely we could build a couple of million big bombs if really wanted to... ;-)