what are some good, free, beat making programs out there on the interweb?

free? hmmm, not much

Hydrogen Advanced Drum Machine is free i think, and pretty fun to play around with

you could always 'obtain' copies of retail packages such as AcidPro of course

ableton live is the greatest thing ever, but they prefer that you pay them.

here's a list of freeware and shareware sampling programs. there are tons of free samples floating around on the internet (here's a decent list).

you could also get a free program that can host vst instruments or plugins like cantabile. there are a fair amount freeware vst insruments out there (just google "free vst instruments"). there are a lot of free vst effects plugins--mda makes an assload.

if you need to mix together any tracks, or edit any wav files, audacity is the shit.

like splates said, most of the free stuff out there is pretty limited. you can still get creative with it, but it'll take lots work to do something a professional piece of software could do in minutes.

download a torrent of Fruity Loops. if you're a beginner, this program is very fun and dead easy to learn and use. plus, you can make some sick beats and fx with it (Concord Dawn used it for their first album).

Acid is also very intuitive and fun to mess around with. You can get some great sounding tunes out of it if you know what you're doing.

acid is pretty easy, yeah

i managed to make something even the first time i tried it - it was and atrocoius combo of the drums off Kelis' 'tasty' with some Joy Division thrown in. God it was awful though.