In true Slashdot fashion, might I humbly suggest the following:

If you don't want a 3DTV, please do not purchase one!

If you don't want to see a 3D movie, see the 2D version -- or get creative, obtain two 3D cinema glasses and fashion some "2D" ones for yourself that only show the left (or right) eye image to both eyes.

Why is there this collective attitude of "OMG I HATE THIS TECHNOLOGY IT MUST DIE NOW"? Some of us have been waiting patiently for some of this tech to reach mass market maturity so that we can do cool stuff with it (3D gaming, head tracking, affordable multiple screen virtual reality, etc.).

3D is not really the whole issue -- I fear that we now have a generation techies who completely lack imagination about anything beyond higher frame rates, the latest handheld gizmo, and the right to download music for free. (You also see this type of hate spewed on advances in space exploration by so-called 'nerds' ).

Read Scroogled by Cory Doctorow for a treatment of how this might go...

I've worked in a lot of different environments, in some as lead, and in some as the coder. I've seen some things which work, and a LOT of "fail."

This is what boils down to: The mission must be more important than anything extraneous to it, and the people must be more important than the mission. NOTHING beats motivation to succeed (not even money).

The "show must go on" attitude (as long as it does not trample on people's lives) really helps to cull the nonsense. Have fast release cycles, and make sure customer feedback is immediate and visible to the team. Do not isolate the team from the end-user. It really helps to have everyone have a sense of ownership in the project -- developers get turned off and start reading Slashdot if they do not see the impact of what they produce.

Encourage new ideas, and listen to people when they speak in areas of their own expertise. Make sure there are several larger steps to be taken after the immediate project, and a grander vision for what the team is trying to accomplish. Development methodology, etc. is team specific -- find what works for your specific team.

Get rid of the jerks, cynics, and fanatics as soon as possible. Make sure you yourself are not in these categories!!!

Foster a sense of teamwork. Keep the team socially engaged with each other. Take them out to lunches, dinners, drinking, etc. Send them to conferences to demonstrate the product, if this is applicable. If they can't stop talking shop during these events, you're doing it right :)

Unless we (as a society) take some very concrete legal steps to make it illegal for our governments to use the results of certain types of surveillance, our children will read 1984 and ask "so, what's the big deal?"

This is not some paranoid worry. If the marginal cost of recording everything you say (online or offline) is near zero (and technology is driving it there), why shouldn't they keep it on file, just in case? (Think of how easy it would be to prosecute certain crimes if you could go back and re-play every conversation the criminal had).

Of course, before that happens "they" will probably buy the publishing rights to the novel, and use forever-copyright and DMCA to make sure nobody ever reads it :)

It's because of this book that I remember pretty much everything I learned in high school chemistry:

http://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Demonstrations-Handbook-Teachers-Chemistry/dp/0299088901

Start with the "Oxidation of Luminol" -- how to make your own glow-in-the-dark chemiluminescent solution.

(All 3 volumes are good -- some of the experiments are dangerous -- use due caution)

(Seeing Prof. Shakhashiri in action is also pretty cool: http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/

Check out his Experiments You can Do at Home"

)

FREE STUFF

UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

MIT OpenCourseWare (haven't tried, but hear good things)

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Khan academy (of course)
http://www.khanacademy.org/

PAID RESOURCES

Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/
(Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)

Also, don't discount old fashioned books:

The "Head First" series of books
(Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)

Head First Physics

Home Schooling Curricula
Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.

Textbooks!
Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:

Chemistry (Oxtoby-Nachtrieb) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Chemistry-Fifth-Edition/dp/B001F39B2Y
(There are many nicely written Biology books -- see what you like)

And if you really want to enjoy chemistry:

Chemical Demonstrations, Shakhashiri

(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)

You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...

I really hope they are not using this newfangled "Internet" thing to coordinate their attacks. Unless they are using devices with vacuum tubes only, the computers and cell phones they use are definitely products of nanotechnology -- the popular sense of 'nanotech' simply involves the application of the same Integrated Circuit fabrication technologies to MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical) devices.

The idea that these devices will start self-reproducing has the same amount of credibility that computers will gain consciousness by themselves all of a sudden...

(Neither is necessarily impossible, but highly unlikely)

I don't know if this specific backdoor is real, but would you be horribly surprised if you found out that your router, etc. had chips in it that could be remotely disabled with the right information fed to the device (e.g., repeated processing of a certain string of bytes in an incoming packet)?

Of course, this stunt could only be pulled off once, and may not work in every device. But it's not inconceivable for a military-industrial power to figure out how certain common chips are used in certain devices, figure out what the chips "see" during regular operation with certain inputs given to the device, and design an "enhancement" for this common chip that will cause it to behave differently when a certain type of signal is received.

Since they have control over their supply chain, it's not inconceivable that they might build this functionality into the chips and flood the market with them. They would have to keep doing this for years. We will be none the wiser until they invoke the capability during a true emergency scenario, when we find that a good percentage of our devices stop functioning for no apparent reason.

I don't know if certain people are really thinking this far ahead, but if they are there is little we can do about it -- except maybe to build custom hardware and hope for the best. Even if hardware were "open source" it's not trivial to open up chips and see what's really inside.

I'm sure the people building the truly mission critical stuff have thought about this and are fabricating their own ICs...

I was actually looking for information on this for a blind friend. Is there Linux distro anyone knows of with these features already installed and turned on?

It's very trendy to hate Facebook, and be proud of not having a profile. But for some of us (especially those of us who have non-techie friends spread across the world), it provides real value.

It lets you:
    1) Find people (and be found by people) that you want to get back in contact with
    2) Hold asynchronous, casual conversations with friends, and friends of friends. I don't know an existing solution which allows the same thing as smoothly.

I am disturbed it has replaced texting and e-mail for most people, and I have friends for whom it is the most reliable contact info (i.e., they don't necessarily pay attention to their e-mail). I would love there to be a real open-source solution which allowed different clients, like e-mail and Usenet News used to be. I don't think this will happen anytime soon...

I seriously pay to have true privacy controls, where I could opt out of having my data / posts sold to whomever paid for it, or let me see who's been bidding (and let me choose who gets it).

I'd also pay to get access to all the data they have on me (what I have deleted, who's viewed my page, etc). This, of course, would not be good for their business model.

But they would probably take my money and sell my data anyway :)

Mod parent up -- I could not have said it better.

And, while you're at it -- get off our collective lawn!

"The Content Advisory committee felt that students would know what flowers were and would view this statement as subjective."

It doesn't get better, actually. Even in higher education you might be punished for knowing too much, or not having the same mindset that a bunch of people sitting around a conference table had at a given moment.

This is why I'm a fan of tests like the MCAT and the GRE, which test application of scientific concepts, with questions statistically validated and reviewed by a lot of people. You won't find as much of the the type of nonsense mentioned in the article on national tests seen by a lot of people.