The problem with this attitude is that you can't have it all. If Open Source developers always respond with "Don't like it? Fuck off, write something better!" it will never be anything more than a cult phenonmenon. Here's a little secret: most people aren't software developers. Telling them to "write something better" means nothing. If you really want Open Source and Linux to take off, it is necessary to embrace the wants and needs of users who don't know anything about coding. As something of a side note, too, there is a compromise for Linux: commercial closed-source software that companies actually sell for profit. Then users can make demands and developers actually have an interest in meeting them. Oops, there goes my Slashdot Karma for mentioning commercial software development on Linux...
In a physics class, worry about physics, not operating systems. Take more time to prepare better demonstrations, good jokes and more interesting material. Get the kids interested in the subject matter at hand. Prepare better for class or learn to be a better speaker. The world would be a better place if kids had a greater appreciation for the pure sciences. Go read A Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and think about it.
Invasion Of Privacy?
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
More than that, says Brandt, Google is a careless custodian of private information. When you search for something at Google, it saves your search terms and associates them with a cookie that is set to live on your machine for 36 years. Brandt fears that law enforcement officials could muscle Google into divulging all the terms you've ever searched for. Those terms could be "a window into your state of mind," and are therefore a clear violation of your privacy, he says.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how is this a violation of your privacy? I mean, the whole thing is that you are using their service for free and willfully sending them the data that you choose. Everyone gets to choose what they search for in a search engine. This isn't private information in any real way. Google is providing you the free service of looking up words that you have intentionally provided. You don't like them being associated with a cookie? Refuse the damn cookie! Really paranoid? Go wander the web on your own without a search engine!
At what point were you guaranteed the free and anonymous use of a search engine? You're not being forced to use it. The world doesn't discriminate against people who do not choose not to efficiently search the web.
People like this are blurring the privacy issue and focusing attention away from legitimate privacy issues.
2. Non-crippled evaluation - No time limits, no nags, none of that. If someone sends me software thats crippled, I let them know thats what I think of their software! (Its crippled).
1. Give Away Fully-Functional Software For Free 2. ????? 3. Profit!
I understand your point, but the Worldcom/Enron analogy is not a very apt one. It is not that the shareholders of those companies knew about the misdeeds and shrugged their shoulders "not realizing they were wrong," rather, they did not know about the deeds at all. Had they known, they would have reacted negatively, it is safe to assume, since they actually did when the facts finally came out.
On the other hand, the spamming situation I was referring to involves people who are aware of the deeds, but have not placed positive or negative values upon them.
I respond to your other points the same way as I did in my previous post: it is reasonable for you personally to want to outlaw spam in order to rid yourself of it. However it is not reasonable to make that argument on behalf of someone who does not mind the spam. Sure, I do mind it myself, but I don't presume to speak for people who haven't made up their mind or don't care. If I believe that eating peanut M&M's will make you go to Hell, and you don't place any particular theological value on chocolate-covered legumes, does that give me the right to make them illegal on your behalf, even if you don't like the taste of them? ( I'll see your analogy and raise you... )
Mostly just playing Devil's Advocate, here, but you say:
Then again, a lot of folks who get this crap in their inboxes don't even realize that it's wrong.
I hate spam, you hate spam, so we say that "it's wrong" when they send it to us, but in cases where the recipients "don't even realize it's wrong", why should we inform this otherwise blissfully ignorant person that they have, in fact, been harmed by receiving junk email? Why not just let them go on not really minding and not really noticing? Sure, we should take measures to make it possible to prevent people from spamming us, if we don't like it, but I don't see how we can or should convince someone else that they don't like it.
It's like the entropy of annoyance or something - once we've got them convinced that they hate it, that's just one unit of person-annoyance in the world. I suspect that the world does not have conservation of annoyance, either. So we are all free to eventually hate everything without regard.
I would start out looking at Small Parts and McMaster-Carr. These guys have all kinds of stuff. No flame intended, but there are lots of resources out there on the web for this sort of thing. Use Google.
When you watch television, you are the product, not the customer. I don't really watch any TV now, but the brainless masses do and will continue to do so, even when there are popup ads on the screen. If people will put up with it, why wouldn't they put more advertisement on television, particularly with these bottom-dollar advertising markets? Putting more ads in is just like Wal-Marts becoming Super Wal-Marts or whatever. A bigger store means more revenue. The television programs themselves are just a distraction.
So, the entire industry must revolve around what is profitable to Microsoft and Microsoft only?
Wait... Who is "the entire industry" here? Isn't the point that this small group of people want Microsoft to include Hebrew support in Office for Mac? What does that have to do with industry? Microsoft creates a product and you either buy it or you don't. If they felt like it was profitable to add this feature, they would. Otherwise, they won't. Pretty simple actually.
Vote with your pocketbook - don't buy MS stuff if it doesn't do something you think is valuable. Or write your own word processor for Mac with Hebrew support and give it away, or try to sell it and put your money where your mouth is about "profitability." In the meantime, Microsoft is going to continue fulfilling its purpose, which is to generate profit for its shareholders. I don't see where any other interests would come into their decisions.
And goodwill? What is that worth? A bunch of people want Microsoft to do something for them for free? And they threaten legal action otherwise, while talking about "goodwill" on the side?
Microsoft has already been convicted of quashing competition.
Microsoft has lost a case in civil court. This is not the same thing as being convicted. The term "conviction" only applies to criminal cases. The burden of proof is dramatically less in a civil case.
Competition is an essential tenet of capitalism. Hence microsoft is not an example of capitalism.
I am afraid you are mistaken (Your posting as an Anonymous Coward demonstrates that you already know that, of course) - capitalism is defined by individual rights for each to compete as they see fit. Pure capitalism is based on the idea of "laissez-faire," which is an extremely stark contrast to the actions the federal and state governments have been taking against Microsoft.
I have no love for Microsoft, but it is folly to say that they are somehow not capitalistic.
I think we can all agree that Microsoft is one of the most successful examples of raw capitalism of the past half-century or so. Like them or not, agree with their practices or not, they've got this capitalism thing down pat. The interesting thing about capitalism is that it always descends the gradient - if there is money to be made doing something, somebody will do it. If it really was easy and profitable to include Hebrew language support, why wouldn't they do it? The answer: the would, of course. Is there any chance that these outsiders' data is better? The answer: probably not - we can safely assume that Microsoft Israel exists to a very large extent to do accurate market research in that country.
The point is, there is no way Microsoft wouldn't include the support if it was profitable, almost by definition.
Close one eye. Can you still estimate the distances of objects around you? Of course you can. This demonstrates that there's much more to depth perception than stereo vision.
This does not mean that you did not learn depth cues such as perspective and relative size from other experiences, such as 3D perception. Simply because you have learned that certain shading patterns imply depth does not mean that you did not initially gather that information via stereo vision
Stereo vision is inherently limited. It requires that the objects have sufficient texture so that points on the two stereo images can be correlated. Our depth perception relies on much more than stereo e.g. common sense knowledge about the world, intution about shading and lighting, etc.
Random dot stereograms were invented to disprove this statement. They clearly demonstrate that you do not need features to see in depth. There is a VERY large body of research surrounding these topics. Start with the book by David Marr.
Just in case you haven't thought about this, for a database-backed website, getting rid of the database connection overhead is just about the smartest thing you can do performance-wise. Think mod_perl. Furthermore, consider moving your SQL server to another machine before making any other hardware changes. (If you haven't already...) The demands of an HTTP server are definitely different than those of a SQL server. If you're going to have a lot of dynamic content, plus a decent number of SSL requests, think about putting a proxy in front of your page-generating server. I know these aren't Apache tweaks, but they're worth considering anyway.
I really don't know. The group already had the robot when I arrived. I think they bought it in 1999. It is pretty loaded full of stuff, so I'm guessing they aren't cheap. It has two computers, a 180-degree laser range-finder, two sets of sonar range finders, IR range finders, a pan-tilt camera, CORBA-based software to control it all and enough lead-acid batteries to keep it running for about six hours between charges. (Not to mention all the drive servos and various shaft-encoding systems) Uses 56K wireless also. I think it came with a laptop, also. I would guess it was around $25K, but I really have no data with which to back that number up.
It is difficult to appreciate just how difficult this problem is. In terms of Artificial Intelligence, we don't even really have the technology for stereoscopic vision yet, much less three dimensional modeling from visual input. For video games and movies, I believe the state of the art is to strap a bunch of specially-colored objects all over the person's body and put them in extremely bright light, then try to reconstruct the body's kinematics from the movements seen in various cameras around the room.
Otherwise, I would do a search for "visual hulls". You'll get some inforfmation about trying to define surfaces given multiple pictures of the same object. Still a difficult problem - getting correlated points is the hard part.
You might check out iRobot. I work at the MIT AI Lab and we use the B21r for my project, which has similar goals. This robot was originally designed by a company called Real World Interface (RWI) that was ultimately purchased by iRobot. In any case, the robot runs Linux and uses V4L as far as I can tell, with what appears to be an off-the-shelf Hauppage WinTV card or equivalent. I don't know much about the camera, but conceptually, you should be able to set something up very similarly.
Now, as far as actually writing the code for real-time vision... that's up to you - good luck - it is a difficult problem.
I just don't understand how they're going to pull this off. If you've ever taken any kind of digital design class, you understand how ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive A/D converters are. I've had a whole lot of fun with the AD670 from Analog Devices and if you look at the pricing, I just don't know where they're going to fit a "cop chip" into this thing. At $10 a chip or thereabout, putting a big chunk of digital logic into it seems unmanageable.
Also, maybe I'm wrong about this, but for the "cop chip" to tell the ADC whether or not everything is good, won't it just have to make a pin high or low to signal it to shut down? I mean, there is a limited number of ways that one chip can efficiently signal another chip. How hard would it be to just tie the "cop chip" lead on an ADC to Vcc and not worry about it again?
This doesn't even get into the fact that there is no WAY, I mean NO WAY for any over-the-counter ADC to pick up a watermark. I mean, its not like in the Flintstones where there is a little bird pecking shit out on a stone tablet and the bird says "Hey, that's copyrighted... SQUAWK!" The ADC doesn't know how its being used. I could be throwing anything at it in any format. Hell, I could have run all sorts of analog signal processing on it beforehand...
Here's a good example: I was building a TTL-based robot for a class that needed to see using an NTSC camera. In the class, we weren't allowed to use any pre-fab processors - we were required to build our own from scratch. So I built a little special-purpose 16-bit RISC processor. So memory wasn't exactly in abundance, due to prototyping limitations, and clock speed wasn't exactly stellar, so the two big video-processing options were out: not fast enough to process NTSC in real-time and not enough memory to store the whole image and then process it. The way I got around this was by using the camera as a sort of memory device and detecting each horizontal sync off of the ADC, then just storing the individual line and processing that. It was an extremely good compromise. My point is this: how would the MPAA or whoever have any idea whether or not there was a watermark on the thing I was pointing the camera at? Particularly since I ran the whole thing through some signal processing before the ADC in order to widen the band of the most relevant image data.
At the end of the day, this is simply impossible. Maybe companies that have a vested interest in this, such as Sony, can integrate it into their higher-level hardware, but I can't imagine that the Analog Devices of the world are ever going to pull this off sanely.
One of the things that the article hinges on is the idea that there will only be $5 to $10 made from software-sales kickbacks. Have we forgotten that Microsoft is actually a software company? Why wouldn't MS write a significant portion of the games itself? They do have that business model worked out pretty well after all. The words "vertical market" come to mind and that definitely changes the economic picture presented by the article.
The "specialized apps" are where it really makes the difference, unfortunately. For example, if you're doing mechanical engineering, there's nothing out there like Pro/ENGINEER for linux (That I know of...). Also, stupid little things like shipping and receiving needing to use UPS software and accounting using Peachtree or Quickbooks. There's not a lot of professional-level software like this out there for Linux. Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of stuff - I run it exclusively, but I have to reboot to use Pro/E.
I think you underestimate just how good human biological vision really is. It is easy to think at first that rods and cones are just like CCDs or pixels or whatever. It is far more complicated than that. In fact, there is extensive research that demonstrates that you can see in higher resolution than should be optically possible. The reason this works is complicated, but basically comes down to the fact that there is an immense amount of inter-cellular interpolation going on. It can be modeled simplistically as an array of voltage sources.
A good starter paper might be the classic "What the Frog's Eye Tells The Frog's Brain" by McCullough, Pitts and Lettvin. (From MIT's RLE Lab in the 50's) More recently, Marr's stuff is supposed to be very good.
It works by artificially limiting the speed. (They did think of this problem, of course...) That way it always has room to speed up in order to catch you.
The corruption/honesty simulation is very interesting, and they make a big deal about how everyone "turns blue" at the end, in other words, the whole society turns honest. The problem is that, if you look, there is a band of red dots right above the blue ones, which means that there were a huge number of "arrests" right before everyone "became honest." I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot like communism or the Taliban or Pat Robertson, or any number of other totalitarian situations. "If we just threaten to throw everyone in jail, everyone will become honest!"
Hmmm... So the simulation is accurate, but I would hypothesize that it does not show that a free society will trend towards "honesty."
As an MIT student, I can very accurately say that you are very wrong on several points. First, in terms of general education, as a CS major freshman, you don't start taking CS classes until second term, and even then you only take a single one: 6.001 in the typical schedule. After that, the focus isn't even on CS exlusively - you are required to take several analog circuit design EE classes before being able to specialize. This doesn't even mention the extensive programs available in the humanities. For example, the graduate program in comparative political science is one of the best in the world.
Your stereotype of socially-inept and non-English-speaking students, while true for some percentage of the student body, is a wildly-inaccurate media-driven generalization. What I found at MIT is that in most cases, smart and academically successful people are also good at a lot of other things: successful actors and musicians to All-American athletes. In fact, one of my friends at MIT was recently recruited to play professional baseball for the Cincinnatti Reds!
What truly makes MIT unique is the interaction with these other outstanding and successful people. They force you to think outside of the box and give you an opportunity to have normal conversations every day about things that my public high school peers would not even have an inkling of interest in.
With regards to course materials on the web, this has been mentioned before, but most of it is already on there - particularly in CS. Check out this list and tell me if things are changing much. Also, you can't even fathom how much work it is for most of these classes and how much most students get out of question/answer sessions in recitation. These are things that cannot be replicated on the web, for better or worse, and no amount of openly available course material can change that. For the MIT CS majors who are reading this - ever take 6.111? I got more out of that class than anything else I've taken and a lot of it had to do with spending 60 hours a week in lab for four months.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this attitude is that you can't have it all. If Open Source developers always respond with "Don't like it? Fuck off, write something better!" it will never be anything more than a cult phenonmenon. Here's a little secret: most people aren't software developers. Telling them to "write something better" means nothing. If you really want Open Source and Linux to take off, it is necessary to embrace the wants and needs of users who don't know anything about coding. As something of a side note, too, there is a compromise for Linux: commercial closed-source software that companies actually sell for profit. Then users can make demands and developers actually have an interest in meeting them. Oops, there goes my Slashdot Karma for mentioning commercial software development on Linux ...
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how is this a violation of your privacy? I mean, the whole thing is that you are using their service for free and willfully sending them the data that you choose. Everyone gets to choose what they search for in a search engine. This isn't private information in any real way. Google is providing you the free service of looking up words that you have intentionally provided. You don't like them being associated with a cookie? Refuse the damn cookie! Really paranoid? Go wander the web on your own without a search engine!
At what point were you guaranteed the free and anonymous use of a search engine? You're not being forced to use it. The world doesn't discriminate against people who do not choose not to efficiently search the web.
People like this are blurring the privacy issue and focusing attention away from legitimate privacy issues.
1. Give Away Fully-Functional Software For Free
2. ?????
3. Profit!
On the other hand, the spamming situation I was referring to involves people who are aware of the deeds, but have not placed positive or negative values upon them.
I respond to your other points the same way as I did in my previous post: it is reasonable for you personally to want to outlaw spam in order to rid yourself of it. However it is not reasonable to make that argument on behalf of someone who does not mind the spam. Sure, I do mind it myself, but I don't presume to speak for people who haven't made up their mind or don't care. If I believe that eating peanut M&M's will make you go to Hell, and you don't place any particular theological value on chocolate-covered legumes, does that give me the right to make them illegal on your behalf, even if you don't like the taste of them? ( I'll see your analogy and raise you... )
Then again, a lot of folks who get this crap in their inboxes don't even realize that it's wrong.
I hate spam, you hate spam, so we say that "it's wrong" when they send it to us, but in cases where the recipients "don't even realize it's wrong", why should we inform this otherwise blissfully ignorant person that they have, in fact, been harmed by receiving junk email? Why not just let them go on not really minding and not really noticing? Sure, we should take measures to make it possible to prevent people from spamming us, if we don't like it, but I don't see how we can or should convince someone else that they don't like it.
It's like the entropy of annoyance or something - once we've got them convinced that they hate it, that's just one unit of person-annoyance in the world. I suspect that the world does not have conservation of annoyance, either. So we are all free to eventually hate everything without regard.
Wait... Who is "the entire industry" here? Isn't the point that this small group of people want Microsoft to include Hebrew support in Office for Mac? What does that have to do with industry? Microsoft creates a product and you either buy it or you don't. If they felt like it was profitable to add this feature, they would. Otherwise, they won't. Pretty simple actually.
Vote with your pocketbook - don't buy MS stuff if it doesn't do something you think is valuable. Or write your own word processor for Mac with Hebrew support and give it away, or try to sell it and put your money where your mouth is about "profitability." In the meantime, Microsoft is going to continue fulfilling its purpose, which is to generate profit for its shareholders. I don't see where any other interests would come into their decisions.
And goodwill? What is that worth? A bunch of people want Microsoft to do something for them for free? And they threaten legal action otherwise, while talking about "goodwill" on the side?
Microsoft has lost a case in civil court. This is not the same thing as being convicted. The term "conviction" only applies to criminal cases. The burden of proof is dramatically less in a civil case.
Competition is an essential tenet of capitalism. Hence microsoft is not an example of capitalism.
I am afraid you are mistaken (Your posting as an Anonymous Coward demonstrates that you already know that, of course) - capitalism is defined by individual rights for each to compete as they see fit. Pure capitalism is based on the idea of "laissez-faire," which is an extremely stark contrast to the actions the federal and state governments have been taking against Microsoft.
I have no love for Microsoft, but it is folly to say that they are somehow not capitalistic.
The point is, there is no way Microsoft wouldn't include the support if it was profitable , almost by definition.
I disagree with both of your points:
Close one eye. Can you still estimate the distances of objects around you? Of course you can. This demonstrates that there's much more to depth perception than stereo vision.
This does not mean that you did not learn depth cues such as perspective and relative size from other experiences, such as 3D perception. Simply because you have learned that certain shading patterns imply depth does not mean that you did not initially gather that information via stereo vision
Stereo vision is inherently limited. It requires that the objects have sufficient texture so that points on the two stereo images can be correlated. Our depth perception relies on much more than stereo e.g. common sense knowledge about the world, intution about shading and lighting, etc.
Random dot stereograms were invented to disprove this statement. They clearly demonstrate that you do not need features to see in depth. There is a VERY large body of research surrounding these topics. Start with the book by David Marr.
Just in case you haven't thought about this, for a database-backed website, getting rid of the database connection overhead is just about the smartest thing you can do performance-wise. Think mod_perl. Furthermore, consider moving your SQL server to another machine before making any other hardware changes. (If you haven't already...) The demands of an HTTP server are definitely different than those of a SQL server. If you're going to have a lot of dynamic content, plus a decent number of SSL requests, think about putting a proxy in front of your page-generating server. I know these aren't Apache tweaks, but they're worth considering anyway.
I really don't know. The group already had the robot when I arrived. I think they bought it in 1999. It is pretty loaded full of stuff, so I'm guessing they aren't cheap. It has two computers, a 180-degree laser range-finder, two sets of sonar range finders, IR range finders, a pan-tilt camera, CORBA-based software to control it all and enough lead-acid batteries to keep it running for about six hours between charges. (Not to mention all the drive servos and various shaft-encoding systems) Uses 56K wireless also. I think it came with a laptop, also. I would guess it was around $25K, but I really have no data with which to back that number up.
It is difficult to appreciate just how difficult this problem is. In terms of Artificial Intelligence, we don't even really have the technology for stereoscopic vision yet, much less three dimensional modeling from visual input. For video games and movies, I believe the state of the art is to strap a bunch of specially-colored objects all over the person's body and put them in extremely bright light, then try to reconstruct the body's kinematics from the movements seen in various cameras around the room.
Otherwise, I would do a search for "visual hulls". You'll get some inforfmation about trying to define surfaces given multiple pictures of the same object. Still a difficult problem - getting correlated points is the hard part.
In any case, good luck - you'll need it.
You might check out iRobot. I work at the MIT AI Lab and we use the B21r for my project, which has similar goals. This robot was originally designed by a company called Real World Interface (RWI) that was ultimately purchased by iRobot. In any case, the robot runs Linux and uses V4L as far as I can tell, with what appears to be an off-the-shelf Hauppage WinTV card or equivalent. I don't know much about the camera, but conceptually, you should be able to set something up very similarly.
Now, as far as actually writing the code for real-time vision... that's up to you - good luck - it is a difficult problem.
I just don't understand how they're going to pull this off. If you've ever taken any kind of digital design class, you understand how ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive A/D converters are. I've had a whole lot of fun with the AD670
from Analog Devices and if you look at the pricing, I just don't know where they're going to fit a "cop chip" into this thing. At $10 a chip or thereabout, putting a big chunk of digital logic into it seems unmanageable.
Also, maybe I'm wrong about this, but for the "cop chip" to tell the ADC whether or not everything is good, won't it just have to make a pin high or low to signal it to shut down? I mean, there is a limited number of ways that one chip can efficiently signal another chip. How hard would it be to just tie the "cop chip" lead on an ADC to Vcc and not worry about it again?
This doesn't even get into the fact that there is no WAY, I mean NO WAY for any over-the-counter ADC to pick up a watermark. I mean, its not like in the Flintstones where there is a little bird pecking shit out on a stone tablet and the bird says "Hey, that's copyrighted... SQUAWK!" The ADC doesn't know how its being used. I could be throwing anything at it in any format. Hell, I could have run all sorts of analog signal processing on it beforehand...
Here's a good example: I was building a TTL-based robot for a class that needed to see using an NTSC camera. In the class, we weren't allowed to use any pre-fab processors - we were required to build our own from scratch. So I built a little special-purpose 16-bit RISC processor. So memory wasn't exactly in abundance, due to prototyping limitations, and clock speed wasn't exactly stellar, so the two big video-processing options were out: not fast enough to process NTSC in real-time and not enough memory to store the whole image and then process it. The way I got around this was by using the camera as a sort of memory device and detecting each horizontal sync off of the ADC, then just storing the individual line and processing that. It was an extremely good compromise. My point is this: how would the MPAA or whoever have any idea whether or not there was a watermark on the thing I was pointing the camera at? Particularly since I ran the whole thing through some signal processing before the ADC in order to widen the band of the most relevant image data.
At the end of the day, this is simply impossible. Maybe companies that have a vested interest in this, such as Sony, can integrate it into their higher-level hardware, but I can't imagine that the Analog Devices of the world are ever going to pull this off sanely.
Just my thoughts.
One of the things that the article hinges on is the idea that there will only be $5 to $10 made from software-sales kickbacks. Have we forgotten that Microsoft is actually a software company? Why wouldn't MS write a significant portion of the games itself? They do have that business model worked out pretty well after all. The words "vertical market" come to mind and that definitely changes the economic picture presented by the article.
The "specialized apps" are where it really makes the difference, unfortunately. For example, if you're doing mechanical engineering, there's nothing out there like Pro/ENGINEER for linux (That I know of...). Also, stupid little things like shipping and receiving needing to use UPS software and accounting using Peachtree or Quickbooks. There's not a lot of professional-level software like this out there for Linux. Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of stuff - I run it exclusively, but I have to reboot to use Pro/E.
I think you underestimate just how good human biological vision really is. It is easy to think at first that rods and cones are just like CCDs or pixels or whatever. It is far more complicated than that. In fact, there is extensive research that demonstrates that you can see in higher resolution than should be optically possible. The reason this works is complicated, but basically comes down to the fact that there is an immense amount of inter-cellular interpolation going on. It can be modeled simplistically as an array of voltage sources.
A good starter paper might be the classic "What the Frog's Eye Tells The Frog's Brain" by McCullough, Pitts and Lettvin. (From MIT's RLE Lab in the 50's) More recently, Marr's stuff is supposed to be very good.
It works by artificially limiting the speed. (They did think of this problem, of course...) That way it always has room to speed up in order to catch you.
I really enjoyed this story on time.com but didn't feel like dealing with submitting it and having it summarily rejected.
Hmmm... So the simulation is accurate, but I would hypothesize that it does not show that a free society will trend towards "honesty."
Your books were funny, unassuming and brilliant. You will be missed by millions.
Your stereotype of socially-inept and non-English-speaking students, while true for some percentage of the student body, is a wildly-inaccurate media-driven generalization. What I found at MIT is that in most cases, smart and academically successful people are also good at a lot of other things: successful actors and musicians to All-American athletes. In fact, one of my friends at MIT was recently recruited to play professional baseball for the Cincinnatti Reds!
What truly makes MIT unique is the interaction with these other outstanding and successful people. They force you to think outside of the box and give you an opportunity to have normal conversations every day about things that my public high school peers would not even have an inkling of interest in.
With regards to course materials on the web, this has been mentioned before, but most of it is already on there - particularly in CS. Check out this list and tell me if things are changing much. Also, you can't even fathom how much work it is for most of these classes and how much most students get out of question/answer sessions in recitation. These are things that cannot be replicated on the web, for better or worse, and no amount of openly available course material can change that. For the MIT CS majors who are reading this - ever take 6.111? I got more out of that class than anything else I've taken and a lot of it had to do with spending 60 hours a week in lab for four months.