mtspim asks: "I work for a non-profit organization that creates interactive math and science curriculum materials for kids and their instructors. Even though we have seen kids learn difficult topic more easily by using a computational approach to learning, most instructors are reluctant to introduce these new ways of thinking into their curriculum. What do Slashdot users think are the best ways to help revitalize math and science programs in our schools, or should we stick to the old conventional methods to learning?"

Mr. Sketch asks: "At my office, they want me to add a wireless network and it seems like it could be possible to do it in a secure way, but I'm not 100% confident. The setup I was thinking of was 802.11g only (no backward 802.11b compatibility), WPA-PSK with AES encryption with a 15 character password consisting of upper and lower case letters and numbers and special characters, MAC filtering, no ssid broadcast, and no default anything (ssid, passwords, etc). How secure would this network be? What type of attacks would it be vulnerable to? I haven't found any tools to crack AES, only WEP, does that mean it's secure or I just that I haven't looked hard enough? I want the wireless computers to still be able to access the computers on our network, in fact ideally, I just want it to be a wireless extension of our wired network, but only if it's secure enough. I'm sure there are plenty of other companies who want to add wireless to their network, but want to be reasonably confident that it will be secure and are unsure of the current state of wireless security."

Panz asks: "Over Easter my 86 year-old grandmother asked my parents to help her buy a CD player. Normally, there would just be a technology barrier to overcome. Unfortunately, my grandmother has macular degeneration which prevents her from using traditional consumer electronics. What, if any, low-vision friendly CD/MP3/audio players are available? Is there such a thing on the market?" What CD/MP3 players have interfaces suitable for people who have less-than-stellar eyesight? Features that would be nice to have would be backlit displays, and larger than normal text displays.

damphlett asks: "My boss is a person of considerable hiring power within the Software Development area of a major global Investment Bank. I've just had a conversation with him that scared the hell out of me. He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience. As someone with 12 years C++ the difference is so self evident I barely knew where to begin explaining his error, but he won't be convinced otherwise. Can Slashdot offer up some tangible benefits that can result from 10+ years experience in programming that I can share with him?"

canfirman asks: "Not exactly a serious question, but maybe good for a laugh: Our company is bringing in new printers into the office, and I noticed that the on-screen instructions state, 'Do not pull pages until after the printer has finished its job'. I thought this would be a redundant instruction (kinda like, 'Don't run with scissors'), but it got me thinking - what are some of the dumbest instructions you have ever seen on a piece of software, hardware, or appliance?"

lidocaineus asks: "I work at a small company with about 30 workstations. Two of us run Linux and three use Mac OS X, so on one of the servers, we installed Teg (both the server daemon and client). It works well since as a turn based game, the five of us are not beholden to it every second of the day, and can turn to it when we have a few free moments (and group chat all in one place other than through Jabber). Recently, some of the Windows folks have become interested in joining. Other than by using cygwin (these are serious computer-challenged types), are there any cross platform turn-based type game clients that work on Windows, preferably using the Linux server as a, well, server? Obviously we're not looking for a quake fest."

LurkingAbout asks: "Maybe it's just me, but it feels like people are sending Word .doc files as attachments more then ever. Typically it's a friendly acquaintance who doesn't realize that .doc is one of Microsoft's ploys to force the few remaining holdouts, like me, to shell out for a copy of Word (or better yet Office). This morning it was the director of my daughter's preschool with the monthly parent newsletter. I've taken to responding with a polite-but-educational message requesting that the sender save the file as RTF or HTML and resend. If I'm feeling long winded I sometimes go into a diatribe about the Evil Empire. Today I started thinking that maybe there's an opportunity for some grassroots organization here. Maybe a concise well-written boilerplate paragraph for just this situation? Or a link to a web page to help educate the masses who think .doc is like air. What do other Slashdot readers do in this situation?"

ferralis (Not an EE) asks: "Recently I've come up with a design for a very fun toy (to be unveiled later if I'm successful). What's missing is a means to send electrical power over a distance of five to ten centimeters (2-4 inches). I've done some research (mostly online) and have found extremely limited information. Even my beloved Google has forsaken me, and even my pleadings to eldritch information deities such as AltaVista have gone unrewarded. Can anyone help?"

mikejz84 asks: "I am working on a design for a college campus TV station. Right now I am trying to find a way to do live events on campus. The link at most would be about a mile and a half. I was thinking microwave, but want something easier. Our campus has a gigabit ethernet backbone, I am wondering if there are any solutions for remote-to-studio links that would work over ethernet and still have very hight quality video? Idealy, I would like to have it where I can send straight DV across Ethernet Live."

DoraLives asks: "I live in a small town in East Central Florida, nearly in the shadow of the launch pads at Cape Canaveral. People generally expect that a place like this would be quite technologically advanced. Unfortunately, this isn't always true, and a case in point is the local library. They have a nice collection of CD's, and you might think you'd see Free Software CD's on the rack right next to Frank Zappa, Duke Ellington, and Bach. Think again, no such thing obtains here, or in any of the other libraries hereabouts." Aside from Linux and BSD install discs, what other pieces of software might make good items for the software section in your local public library?

Tarohann asks: "I work for a large software services company and I'm planning to write an article on Enterprise application Stress and Volume Testing (SVT) based on a couple of experiences I've had. For the most part I feel that most Enterprise SVT initiatives performed by companies at the enterprise level are flawed as they are done on ideal/non-production environments. I was wondering if anybody here has had any good/bad experiences or pointers (websites, books) I can refer to on this subject. Full credits will be given. Thanks, Slashdot!"

cpfeifer asks: "Russ Miles wrote about going through the pain of setting up his own infrastructure for his OSS project, AspectXML. He asks: 'Are there tools out there that make this process much easier, and perhaps ones that I could take advantage of by moving my own open source project to? Also what experiences have people had with the different community projects?' Should you start up your own gforge server, host it on Sourceforge, or perhaps look to one of the OSS groups like Apache, Codehaus or Tigris?"

mengel asks: "So this last week, I repeated my annual ritual of trashing my scratch partition, making a FAT filesystem on it, booting Microsoft Windows(tm), and installing tax software to do my taxes. I had hoped, with the advent of Xandros, and of Linspire (formerly Lindows), that one of these increasingly important commercial companies would have talked someone like Intuit, or the Tax Cut guys, into developing this years tax software against Wine, so that it would also run on Linux under Wine as well as on MSWindows. So what has to happen before the companies who write Tax Cut and TurboTax will do versions that least run under Wine, much less native Linux versions? What can we do to help make that happen?"

langeland asks: "I have a friend who is selling subscriptions to an online library of computer literature (for example Books 24x7 or O'Reilly's Safari). He's trying hard to convince me that a library of 3000 books on anything from introductions to various programming languages and reference books to Windows 2003 Server, or MySQL is actually useful. I don't get it - nobody would read a whole book online anyway, so they can only be useful for trouble shooting ad hoc problems (or am I wrong here?). I'm thinking Google is a lot faster for solving problems at the busy job, and you'll probably find good plain web references on most technologies and stick with them. The price for a subscription to Books 24x7 is 400$ a year/seat! Do You have experience with these online libraries? Are they useful and worth the money?"

foolinator writes "Wired News has reported that Futurama could be making a comeback! From the article: "Last year, Futurama and Family Guy reruns did so well that it's likely both shows (which Fox killed in prime time) will produce new episodes." " Now if only I could get more Firefly, TV might be worth watching again.

phorm writes "Not so long ago, higher-definition LCD's used to be quite hard to come by, with laptops and other hardware tending to use old non-TFT-style LCD's which ugly bleeding colors and poor refresh. Nowadays, almost everything has a nice TFT (Thin-film-transistor) display, including laptops, PDA's, digital camera, and often even cellphones. However, not all of these devices are as dependable as they once were, and many of them end up as little more than paperweights. With TFT-LCD's by themselves still being somewhat of a pricey commodity, is there any way to salvage and use these parts for home projects? I personally have an 8" notebook display, and a 1.5" digital camera LCD which are just begging to be recycled as something useful such as a projector component, status display, or something else useful. So far I've had little luck discovering a way to get these components to work outside of the original hardware, so I was wondering if any enterprising hardware-nerds on Slashdot have had better luck than I and could offer a few pointers. Are these components doomed to end up in a landfill, or can somebody offer a way to make them useful again?"

anomalie asks: "I am trying to sell IP telephony to my employer. The idea was shot down once already because of the cost (using a Cisco solution). I would like to find a cheap but reliable IP PBX because everyone liked the idea of IP telephony, just not the price associated with it. I need a system that could initially handle about 80 users at a single location, and eventually handle about 350 users at 7 locations. The two systems I have been looked at so far are Asterisk & Pingtel's SIPxchange IP PBX. I'm not looking here for a final solution, just some starting points for more research. Any feedback/tips/warnings from the Slashdot community?"

AJ asks: "Well, in the midst of writing 1 of my 3 papers tonight, I realized how insecure my school's network is. It all started because I was upset about them changing from using my SSN to a proprietary number scheme for identifying students. I didn't think that was a bad thing, but I was wondering if they really were securing things. So, I needed a password to access a school resource from the internet. After a little of dabbling around, I found the place where I needed to enter my propriety school ID and password. As it turns out, the login form uses HTTP instead of HTTPS! Also, my school runs a wide-open wireless network that I always had considered a convenience, but now I am changing my passwords over that network! Oh, and that proprietary ID along with a password, lead right to a student summary page where my DOB, age, address and SSN are located. So Slashdot, what is a concerned student to do?"

MikeDawg asks: "With so much uncertainty in the current job market for tech workers, and with varying financial situations; are you required (or want) to work a second job? I'm in one of those situations. I work as a bartender during the days and weekends, and I work as a mainframe operator during the night. Often browsing classified ads for positions, I see ads for jobs that pay a minimal amount more than my current tech job, and a possibility for less stability (see this Slashdot Article). Do you think it would be a better idea for someone to work two somewhat secure jobs, getting paid a little bit less, or going for a higher paying somewhat insecure job? I also run into varying conflicts such as scheduling if I would like to try and maintain two jobs, which is never fun (Don't even ask about how happy my girlfriend is). So my question to you out there, would you rather work 2 secure jobs, that pay a little bit less than what you could be making, or would you rather get paid a touch more, and work for 1 less secure employer?"

meriksen asks: "I found a very interesting paper which I am sure will stir up a hornets nest. Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems." What do you think of the issues given in this paper, and how do you think the Open Source community should address these issues?