The government of Islesboro, Maine provides municipal broadband to every home and business on the island---yep, an island accessible by ferry off the coast of Maine---with the option to have 1-gigabit state-of-the-art fiber-to-the-premise broadband Internet access. Subscribers, who choose, pay a $360 yearly subscriber fee. That's $30/month! More information at: http://townofislesboro.com/com...
. . . IT and private industry that misuses the H1B system. In Monterey, CA there’s a school called Defense Language Institute (run by Uncle Sam himself) that employs a boatload of H1B visa holders and they are being treated very poorly in both pay and work conditions. That is, our own government is breaking the law with regards to H1B visa holders, so please don't expect them to fix it. Apples to Apples, the DLI worker works twice as much for half the pay compared to other colleges in the immediate area. God forbid one of their H1B visa holders gets uppity, they'll be summarily shipped back the very next day at the worker's expense. Monterey is a really expensive place too, and I have witnessed 50+ year old professors working 60 hours week year round living in poverty. Yikes!!!
http://www.sagemath.org/ should be visited by anyone interested in helping promote (including R) open source software that is numerical in nature. I agree that programming is important if you need answers to tough (realistic) math questions, and SageMath will allow you to explore a number of open-source packages ( NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R, etc.). Really, SageMath needs more users . . . please help!
Count me in on this one too. In fact you can count on everyone to have an idea that later came true, but they failed to implement it. The failure to capitalize on our ideas is as old as time itself, and everyone here is a prime example of this. I have countless stories of trying to get something to work (I was trying to implement a Dropbox like service in the 80s) and then seeing it fizzle out---the sad truth is that harebrained ideas are just that, and this guy had no clue on how to implement and Microsoft was right in dismissing his idea. Yes, my Dropbox idea in the 80s was harebrained too!
If you're looking for a way cool way to store and share (or not share) you code/files, just check out Dropbox. It just works!
RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music. The service has existed since 1998 and was built and is being operated by Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland.
Not religion, but federally funded dogma. More than 20 years ago I became aware of how dogma gets grounded in fundamental research: you need to write grants that fit the dogma. One hapless soul actually stood up during a big AIDS conference and suggested that the researchers were mere lemmings. He, of course, was shouted down, but he was only trying to tell the lemmings to keep an open mind. Fast forward 20+ years and the lemmings are still in control.
Our educational system is totally broken when the educated just want things to fit. Even in mathematics, we're promoting a crop of "just tell me what to do!"
Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.
