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A friends mom escaped the wreck of a 90ft Fish Packer as it hit the rocks at night in a passage with strong currents due to a problem caused by relying on GPS. It was due to something like how it derived the heading vs the direction of travel or some-such.

Moral of the story was that using static ground stations like LORAN, this would not have occurred. Anyhow, now ground stations have been dismantled and vessel's receivers scrapped and there is nothing groundbased to replace GPS with should GPS fail. High altitude communications aircraft seem viable; however, there again is a reliance on something that is not physically bolted down and easily fixable.

An interesting footnote is mentioned by Buckminster Fuller in his 50 year summation masterwork "Critical Path": on pages 186-7. The Americans started their radio-accurate mapping from Compass Island in Penobscot Bay in Maine, and proceeded by radio triangulation to work their way down to South America, across the Atlantic and up Africa to Europe. This was needed for accurately guiding bombers above the clouds, as the ground survey maps were often 10's of miles incorrect.

The Germans had done this as well for Europe and perhaps Russia, so when Berlin fell, the Russians went in early and took the German mapping data. Russia had radio-accurate maps of all of Europe and published data from the US, while the US did not have maps of Russia. This lead to the importance in the cold war of US spy planes and satellites for basic mapping for targeting ICBM's, including as suggested by Fuller a US presence in Iran and Afghanistan as radio triangulation bases. Russia performed massive deceptions of fake cities and so on to perpetuate this information gradient.

... given that people want to see subjective numbers. See:

http://www.amazon.ca/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728

Having had to go this exact route, I started to take business analysis courses through a local college to compliment the IT knowledge and work through two fields. An excellent resource books is PMBOK http://www.amazon.ca/Guide-Project-Management-Body-Knowledge/dp/193069945X/ref=sr_1_1/190-4122478-2675606?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240410769&sr=1-1. The book is really straight forward in general concepts and will give you a good fundamental understanding of project management. If you wish to follow through, there is a designation certification as well. A lot of project management just comes down to being really good at making flow charts and having a general concept of lengths of 'reasonable' work to complete projects. You have to be really detailed oriented and have good common sense.

See also Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care) by William Marsden. There's whole chapter devoted to this. Nukes + oil = horrendously dumb. Doesn't even get much oil out.

This book describes Nelson's tactics in full gory detail. No ramming. His aim was to bring the broadside of his ships-of-the-line against the bow or stern of the enemy ships. It exposed them to fire as they approached, but put them in a short-range position where all of his guns on one side (52 cannons?) could be brought to bear, with the enemy unable to fight back effectively. The book I mentioned relishes in describing the tactic of "raking", where cannon balls from broadsides are sent from one end of the enemy ship out the other end, destroying everything in it's path: splintering wood and shattering humans. The decks of the French and Spanish ships were flooded with blood, with some crews almost completely wiped out. The shots that were "making two holes" were actually problematic at times, specifically when an enemy ship had a British ship along both sides - at that point the British gunners would have to reduce the amount of gunpowder lest their shots passed right through the enemy ship and into a friend.

That isn't true.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/
http://www.amazon.de/
http://www.amazon.fr/
http://www.amazon.co.jp/
http://www.amazon.ca/

I only checked the first few, but they all have music stores.

Agreed. And I would add: Refactoring by Fowler and friends.

I would agree. "Refactoring" is one of the best programming books out there and I use the information in it nearly every day at work. Probably the single best technical read of my career.

Agreed. And I would add: Refactoring by Fowler and friends.

He most certainly is rich.

There is a darker side of the Charles Fipke story. After the Ekati diamond mine opened up, and he set himself up with a practically infinite supply of cash, he split from his wife Marlene, who had stuck by him while he worked from 8am to 3am seven days a week, in pursuit of his dream. In many ways she was his partner, working long hours helping analyze samples in the kitchen of their tiny apartment, while they were on the verge of being evicted due to non-payment of rent. Apparently their divorce settlement was the largest ever in Canada.

Also, right before he had his major breakthrough, he had a falling out with his long-time close friend and ally Stu Blusson, a helicopter pilot who had also worked very hard with Fipke, many times without pay.

To be fair, I don't know if it was the success, or something else, that drove apart Fipke and his wife. Divorce and separation are never simple. Just those little details made an impression on me, to see how one can enjoy massive material success yet still suffer in personal relationships.

Essentially, the guy is now filthy rich, surrounded by gorgeous women, doing whatever he wants. His latest project, if I'm not mistaken, is to find the biblical lost treasures of King Solomon.

An account of the whole story, beginning with Fipke's early days growing up in the Canadian prairies in Saskatchewan, can be found in the book Fire Into Ice, by Vernon Frolick. It is a very entertaining read, even if the book is somewhat biased in favour of Fipke.

See lament for a nation

Book info (amazon)
http://www.amazon.ca/Lament-nation-defeat-Canadian-nationalism/dp/0886292573

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_for_a_Nation:_The_Defeat_of_Canadian_Nationalism

Lament for a Nation is a 1965 essay of political philosophy by Canadian philosopher George Grant. The essay examined the political fate of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservative government in light of its refusal to allow nuclear arms on Canadian soil, and the Liberal party's political acceptance of the warheads.

Although grounded in the particular examination of Diefenbaker's fate in the 1963 federal election, the analysis transcended Canadian politics, studying Canadian and American national foundations, Conservatism in Britain and North America, Canada's dual nature as a French and English nation, the fate of Western Enlightenment, and the philosophical analysis of citizenship in modern democracies.

Content
According to Grant, Diefenbaker's position against the Bomarc was defeated by the Central Canadian establishment, who conspired with the Liberal Party to bring down Diefenbaker and diminish Canadian sovereignty. This was his lament; he felt there was an emerging Americanization of Canadians and Canadian culture due to the inability of Canadian to live their lives outside of the hegemony of American liberal capitalism - and the technology that emanates from that system.

Critical reception
Described as one of the seminal works of Canadian political thought, it discusses the influence of the United States via liberalism and technology on Canada - which Grant argued was traditionally a less-liberal and more traditionally conservative entity and culture. Grant argued that Canada was doomed as a nation as was illustrated by the 1963 Bomarc Missile Program crisis. He predicted the end of Canadian nationalism, which for Grant meant a small-town, populist conception of Canada as a British North American alternative to American capitalism and empire, and a move towards continentalism.

Word.

(Posting quasi-relevant comment here because I can't post and moderate in the X.org thread)

"I don't want to be kept in this consumer-lifestyle-prison. I don't want to take things from society that I haven't been directly involved in creating. Not one single damned thing. I look around this office, and every object I see is covered in the invisible hand prints of thousands of people who don't give a shit, and I hate it so much that it makes me want to smash it all to bits."

I understand what you're saying, I think, because I feel this way too -- but I think there are two separate issues which are intertwined here and need to be pulled apart.

1. I don't believe it's intrinsically degrading for humans to live in community, to share effort and tools and cooperate. There is a school of thought, from the Transcendentalists on, through Freud and Satre, and to some extent Rand, which believes that *any* kind of cooperation between individuals is 'selling out' to a nebulous 'society' and that self-actualisation is at odds with group conformity. I believe this idea of 'heroic individualism' has often, since the Beat Poets of the 1950s, become dangerously confused with true freedom -- dangerous because it is self-defeating. One can see this 'me against the gray masses' ethic entrenched in popular culture such as the Punk and Grunge music movements, The Matrix. It blurs anarchism and existentialism into a kind of generic unfocused rage against a soul-destroying machine, but never resolves into specific focused organisational efforts. It poses as rebellion but is effortlessly subverted by the corporate commercial octopus because it is in fact animated by the same spirit that drives capitalism itself: the so-called need to differentiate the self from the mob. It is a fake revolution that solves nothing, but feels good and makes snappy youth marketing.

See the book 'The Rebel Sell' for a good takedown of this mindset.

2. Money is a bad way of solving a worse problem, which is that people often seem unmotivated to work on problems of value to the group (which is to say, problems vital to their own personal self-interest but on a long-term horizon). It is a bad solution because as you correctly observe, money distorts the true value of things, it subverts a person's natural intuition about reality. With the rise of global speculation, our money systems are becoming unhinged and increasingly separated from actual reality, judging a sort of casino / popularity contest. When markets crash, as they periodically do, it becomes obvious how disconnected from reality they are -- but then we forget and trust them again.

Compartmentalisation, disconnection, and outsourcing of work are not *in themselves* bad, I think. They enable us to work on huge tasks such as building space stations and the Internet that are beyond any one person's capacity. But when 'can I make money doing this' becomes the *primary* driver of people's work rather than 'is this the best use of my skills and time and the best thing I can be doing for the planet' -- then yes, we have a problem, and the work we are doing is probably contributing the the world's pain rather than fixing it.

Alfie Kohn's 'Punished by Rewards' is an interesting look at the problem of distorted incentives and how doing things for reward rather than love can actually *disincentivise* people.

3. We need to realise that 'I was just making money' fails the Nuremburg defense in the same way as 'I was just following orders'. But 'I will go live on my own in the woods' is not a solution either. We need alternative ways of organising society based on love, trust and intrinsic motivation. I'm serious. Moving to such a system will be a huge shift, it will take much time, work and pain, and will have to be done while the loveless, money-driven economy is crashing about our ears, but it will have to happen or we will all die.

"I don't want to be kept in this consumer-lifestyle-prison. I don't want to take things from society that I haven't been directly involved in creating. Not one single damned thing. I look around this office, and every object I see is covered in the invisible hand prints of thousands of people who don't give a shit, and I hate it so much that it makes me want to smash it all to bits."

I understand what you're saying, I think, because I feel this way too -- but I think there are two separate issues which are intertwined here and need to be pulled apart.

1. I don't believe it's intrinsically degrading for humans to live in community, to share effort and tools and cooperate. There is a school of thought, from the Transcendentalists on, through Freud and Satre, and to some extent Rand, which believes that *any* kind of cooperation between individuals is 'selling out' to a nebulous 'society' and that self-actualisation is at odds with group conformity. I believe this idea of 'heroic individualism' has often, since the Beat Poets of the 1950s, become dangerously confused with true freedom -- dangerous because it is self-defeating. One can see this 'me against the gray masses' ethic entrenched in popular culture such as the Punk and Grunge music movements, The Matrix. It blurs anarchism and existentialism into a kind of generic unfocused rage against a soul-destroying machine, but never resolves into specific focused organisational efforts. It poses as rebellion but is effortlessly subverted by the corporate commercial octopus because it is in fact animated by the same spirit that drives capitalism itself: the so-called need to differentiate the self from the mob. It is a fake revolution that solves nothing, but feels good and makes snappy youth marketing.

See the book 'The Rebel Sell' for a good takedown of this mindset.

2. Money is a bad way of solving a worse problem, which is that people often seem unmotivated to work on problems of value to the group (which is to say, problems vital to their own personal self-interest but on a long-term horizon). It is a bad solution because as you correctly observe, money distorts the true value of things, it subverts a person's natural intuition about reality. With the rise of global speculation, our money systems are becoming unhinged and increasingly separated from actual reality, judging a sort of casino / popularity contest. When markets crash, as they periodically do, it becomes obvious how disconnected from reality they are -- but then we forget and trust them again.

Compartmentalisation, disconnection, and outsourcing of work are not *in themselves* bad, I think. They enable us to work on huge tasks such as building space stations and the Internet that are beyond any one person's capacity. But when 'can I make money doing this' becomes the *primary* driver of people's work rather than 'is this the best use of my skills and time and the best thing I can be doing for the planet' -- then yes, we have a problem, and the work we are doing is probably contributing the the world's pain rather than fixing it.

Alfie Kohn's 'Punished by Rewards' is an interesting look at the problem of distorted incentives and how doing things for reward rather than love can actually *disincentivise* people.

3. We need to realise that 'I was just making money' fails the Nuremburg defense in the same way as 'I was just following orders'. But 'I will go live on my own in the woods' is not a solution either. We need alternative ways of organising society based on love, trust and intrinsic motivation. I'm serious. Moving to such a system will be a huge shift, it will take much time, work and pain, and will have to be done while the loveless, money-driven economy is crashing about our ears, but it will have to happen or we will all die.

Amazon has operations in other countries.

Points all well taken. As I said, over time some differences of opinion (or outright beliefs) can add strength to a relationship, whereas others can destroy it. In a case like this, it often boils down to just how determined you both are in your beliefs. Does she (or he) read their horoscope routinely and try to use it to guide their day a bit, or does she (or he) actively spend their spare time in new-age occult shops selecting crystals for the right energy, and sticking nametags on water jugs? One is must easier to ignore than the other. The thing is, belief (to almost any extreme) in such things DOES NOT PRECLUDE belief in science!!! It's illogical and irrational, but it's also entirely possible given that we are illogical and irrational beings! Strange but true...

For the record, my wife has a technical degree and a love of the sciences and arts, but also sticks labels on water jugs. I occasionally roll my eyes, but I don't have to argue with her about it, because I don't have to be right about every little thing in our relationship. Sometimes I can (and should) just let things lie as they are, no matter how illogical. She does the same for me when I get wound up about totally trivial (to the outside world) problems with computing companies. It's all part of the give and take.

(Also, for the OTHER record, although we had known each other casually for quite a few years, it wasn't until both of us stopped actively hunting for a partner that we noticed each other.)

I'm not saying, I'm just saying...

I think highly of the British and recognize her many achievements during WWII even if American history texts are lacking in that respect.

I'm not on about who was better (and I recognize you're not, either), but you may be making my point - and you have a few inaccuracies.

The Japanese won a moral and military victory over the British Navy in the Pacific before the US involvement. Wish I could remember the names of those ships lost or the Japanese admiral who devised the plan. Point is, the east colonies were largely out at that point, leaving those you mention. The only protection for such shipping would have the US and British Navies - no disrespect, but the other countries didn't have sufficient size Navies for surface force escorts.

US casualties were on par with the UK - but the US had more in its Army alone than the combined services of the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

I submit the following points:

1. I don't know if it's true that the Spitfire (a marvelous airplane) won the air war or not, but I'll accept the statement at face value. That being said, and given you're not referring to the Battle of Britain, to which particular aspect do you refer? Ground support? Where was the UK going to get the men to double its effective fighting force for these ground battles, if not the US? Bomber escort? The Spit lacked the range, and that's assuming that the Lancasters, et al, would have been able to take to the air without US resupply. In addition, those Spitfires didn't do the job themselves, as the top three fighters in sheer numbers alone were all US - the P-47, P-51, and P-40. http://www.chuckhawks.com/p40.htm

2. Resupply. Had the US not entered the war, where would those supplies come from? The US and US Merchant Marine would have stayed out of harm's way. Snorkel detection did not allow Britain to win the sea war, neither did Britain win the sea war, neither would it have even it did without re-supply from the US. I guess for your argument to work, the US would have had to have been a den of mere shopkeepers, willing to supply the UK with Liberty Ships without any interest in the outcome (or something - the self-references become tangled at this point, but the historical inaccuracy in such a viewpoint alone would be worth a book - that no one would read). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship Those 2751 Liberty Ships weren't used to sail between the British Isles or Canada or India - they were bringing materiel with them - from the US. The production capacity of the UK was seriously threatened and would have diminished beyond your theory's basis had there been no US resupply, and without that resupply, the UK's ability to fight this hypothetical protracted war stretches the imagination to the breaking point.

3. Production capacity of Russia? No. http://www.amazon.ca/Russias-Life-Saver-Lend-Lease-U-S-S-R-World/dp/0739107364 Production capacity you ascribe is something they specifically lacked. The Ju-87D sucked against modern forces, but did quite well in the USSR, until US P-39s, with Soviet pilots, took to the air. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-39_Airacobra

4. It was not a war of attrition in 1942 when the US arrived in the European theatre. It was a war of bold strikes and new tactics for mechanized warfare.

I suppose in the US, Hollywood generally ignores the British in telling the story of the war; I find a lot of people think of the Brits like a Ladies Auxiliary or something. But you're doing the same thing in reverse. From the simplest (and not unreasonable) reading of statistics, then according to your version of history, the UK was going to win on its own, taking longer time,

no Battlestar Galactica season 3 in North America, for example

And here in Canada it's hard to buy major-label music for an MP3 player that's not an iPod.

In many cases the only way for us to get "content" is to download it illegally.

While I have respect for the fact you took the time to compile a set of links in response to my inquiry, I have far less respect for the load of flamebait you prepared.

If you make a claim, you support it.

I'll look at the documents you provided and decide what I think about them. This gives you the opportunity to pick how you present your argument. It makes for a much more meaningful result as the information I'm looking at is related to what you think is most important.

In addition, if you want to pick a fight, I would like to see some support for your other claims:

"Most of the crops we eat today (including certified "organic" crops) have been produced by mutation breeding"
I hope that one of the last three links you sent covers this one, because the first three appear to not.

"the ancient Incas developed systems for [artificially] introducing mutations."
I believe what you're referring to is crossbreeding, not mutagens in this case.

and for fun
"the GM that you oppose is the safest kind of GM"
Where did I ever say I was opposed to the process. I have repeatedly stated that I oppose releasing the genes back into the wild.
Where did I ever say I support the other variety, if until this point, I was unaware of its existence, hence asking for resources.

In response to the links you supplied:

http://www.amazon.ca/Mutation-Breeding-Theory-Practical-Applications/dp/0521036828/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200536610&sr=1-6

This resource talks about inducing mutations.

However, this is a link to a book you can buy from Amazon. The information available is very limited. From the description, the page previews, and the table of contents, it never mentions once that the results are used or to be used for a viable food source. Section 1.2 describes how "plant breeding" can be used to improve 'yield,' 'harvests,' or 'crops.' This, however is not 'mutation breeding.' From the book: "In most cases yield is considered in relation to food and fodder crops, but yield could also refer to the production of latex, fibers, wood, or number of flowers per unit of area"

From the first six pages, which are all that are available on the site, they push the issue that the technique applies to non-food crops, and never mention that current practice is to use these techniques on food crops.

They also don't specify mutagens or radiation. For this one, I concede nothing.

The second link: https://www.vedamsbooks.com/no38082.htm
is much more interesting.

While it doesn't contain any content from the book except the table of contents, it does mention using gamma radiation to modify a fuel source. It also has a short excerpt stating "A large number of new promising varieties in different crops have successfully been developed world wide using both physical and chemical mutagens." It goes on to say that the developments include successes in edible crops and oils. The only thing is... they describe the process as experimental. Yes, they're studying it. Yes they're using radiation and chemicals to induce these changes. No, it doesn't hint that they are using the techniques as you claimed, and I quote "Most of the crops we eat today (including certified "organic" crops) have been produced by mutation breeding."

As I said before, I'm quite amused that the techniques actually exist. I am surprised. This is not enough to support your statement yet.

On to the 3rd link?
http://www.fnca.mext.go.jp/english/mb/mbm/e_mbm.html
This is an extraordinary resource.
Full text available discussing everything from chemical techniques to radiation. This includes a discussion of the inner workings of the cell.

This is exactly t

Show me a source other than TMNT, the DC universe, or the marvel universe that describes the use of radiation and mutagenic (carcinogenic) agents in order to produce viable food. I would be ever so entertained.

Designing the Obvious is a fairly good book about UI design. I highly recommend it. Here's a link.

Your mindset is very important here, so by all means get the book Overcoming Math Anxiety by Sheila Tobias. She too had difficulty with math and dropped it, and later on, picked it up again, just as you wish to do now. She runs a university math clinic for people who have had problems similar to your's, and her insights might be very useful. (There also might be such a clinic at your local university).

I was always awful at math, did as little as possible. Never went to college, although I did finish high school. Taught myself to program assembly language on an 8086 a year after my first grandchild was born. Learned specific math skills writing animated games with QuickBasic. Like how to make a spinning wagon wheel while moving the wagon across the screen. Then make it go slower or faster, turn right or left, all while the wheels continue to turn in an appropriate manner. My favorite resource at that time was a book on QuickBasic by Gary Cornell, a mathematics professor at the University of Connecticut. He later wrote books on Java.

http://www.amazon.ca/s?ie=UTF8&rh=n%3A927726%2Cp_27%3AGary%20Cornell%2Cp_3%3A%2415%20-%20%2420&page=1

See Orlando Patterson's book, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Patterson makes a substantial argument that our very concept of freedom came from ancient Greece - but not the from the high culture, from the slaves. The concept then worked its way from the slaves into the high culture (it was after all a very small place) particularly through the playwrights.

But then, being a slave is not the same thing in all times and places. The biggest slaveholders in recorded history were the Arabs. But some of their slaves rose to high positions, despite their slave status. (The reason the Africans were so ready to trade slaves to the Europeans when their ships showed up was that they already had for many centuries profitably traded slaves to the Arabs who lived closer to them. The Europeans were looking for anything of value they could trade their goods for; it was the Africans who came up with the idea of offering slaves for those goods.)

Here's a different hypothesis: Islamic countries are not progressing because they're monotheist. When Europe went through its heavily monotheistic period that produced the Dark Ages. Science re-emerged in the Renaissance precisely when European education returned to Roman and Greek texts, and its intellectual culture largely embraced the polytheism in those texts, leaving monotheism largely to the uneducated classes. Aside from that, even in the Dark Ages the Church, with its many saints, was far more polytheistic than almost all forms if Islam. The claim could be made that at least some of our Jewish scientists have been monotheists; but a close examination of what, for example, Einstein said about religious belief makes it clear that his use of "God" has little in common with the religious uses. More importantly, Judaism has never had a monolithic interpretation of its texts - there is far less dogma than in most forms of Christianity and Islam, and the scholars have always been expected to engage in open and active debate.

As for America's success at science, that came from our Deistic background - which stresses neither dogma nor faith. Ben Franklin set the tone on this. Very few of the American scientists have ever been particularly religious, in the way of wearing blinders in loyalty to some set of revealed teachings.

> this has nothing to do with production costs, and everything to do with the change in the relative value of the currencies
That was my point exactly. The only way I would accept the deviation in pricing is if they were produced by Canadian printers at a higher cost due to lower production runs.

Well to be fair the pricing reflects a CDN $ at $0.65 - which it hasn't been in a long time. I've spot-checked my books, which span from the 1980's to now (the ones I checked - I've got plenty predating 1980) - you're right, that currency does seem to play a bit of a role in pricing, but it is updated VERY slowly - pre 1997 books, I can understand. But post-1997, with the option to buy online at currency value, well,

Here's an example:
K&R's C Programming Language in Amazon.com is $40 (rounded)
http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming-Language-2nd/dp/0131103628/ref=pd_bbs_2/105-0648757-4344429?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190309328&sr=8-2

The same book from Amazon.ca is $60 (rounded)
http://www.amazon.ca/Programming-Language-Brian-W-Kernighan/dp/0131103628/ref=sr_1_1/701-4896514-8538726?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190309304&sr=8-1

Both are shipped free.

Why, as a consumer, would I spend $20 more for the same book? In today's world, it makes no sense for books which have currency-based price deviations to have static prices, or prices updated so slowly.

I'm sorry that the small store suffers - $20 more in my pocket means that I've got disposable income to spend - or invest - elsewhere. It's the publishing houses which pocket the difference - I can't imagine how the book stores take a larger margin. The Canadian book and comic stores need to petition the publishing houses to have a more sensible and more dynamic pricing strategy. I don't mind if their prices are out of date if it's a small deviation, but raising prices by 30% which doesn't reflect the currency state for quite some time.

I don't know how the publishing houses would reflect currency rates for books already in stock - as a consumer, I hate to say that this is just not my problem. I would buy Canadian if the price was equitable, but only a fool would spend 30% more as a matter of national pride, when a more sensible corporate policy could address this. They've been pocketing the currency difference for years - sorry, but with the internet, they've got to change their business model if they want to keep their Canadian stores open.

For comics, which are produced monthly (more or less), they can update the pricing accordingly - who knows what they can do for subscriptions, but that's their problem.

If you look at what they are doing most of the individual elements are not new (check the 1992 book The Reactive Keyboard http://www.amazon.ca/Reactive-Keyboard-John-J-Darr agh/dp/0521403758 ) - however the combination of individual elements *may* be new and sufficiently creative to make for a defensible case against infringers.

Microsoft has a long history of announcing new technologies long before they really exist in order to prevent a competitor from gaining marketing hype and momentum. This strategy goes right back to the earliest Windows versions -- you can read lots about this from an MS programmer's perspective in Barbarians.

Since Apple is about to announce their "top secret" features in Leopard, it seems obvious it will be this sort of touch screen technology and that Microsoft is trying to steal Apple's thunder by announcing this vaperware.

boxlight

>Please show me on which planet Live costs $15/month. If you are going to take swipes at least try to have some facts right.

Planet earth. $46.52 / 3 = $15.51 monthly, before 14% taxes.

Ok, so that's $CDN, but hey, you didn't specify.

While not all the CDs I see are cheap, I see the majority of albums in the store to be between $8 (yes, many are that cheap) and $15. For examples of prices, check out Amazon.Ca. While most of the CDs are above $11, it's not a significant amount, usually $2 or $3. So, yes $11 is way too much for a collection of digital files that probably costs them 50 cents in bandwidth to transfer to me.

Here you go :
http://www.amazon.ca/Nunchuck-Controller-Nunchuk-N intendo-Wii/dp/B000IMYKQ0/ref=pd_bbs_1/701-1685769 -9921158?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1178405533&sr=8- 1

Linux for Windows Administrators (Mark Minasi) may be what you're looking for.
http://www.amazon.ca/Linux-Windows-Administrators- Mark-Minasi/dp/0782141196/ref=sr_1_3/701-7362000-3 966705?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177438579&sr=8-3
or http://tinyurl.com/3b8ug8

Your complaints are very similar to my own and it's the reason I keep giving up on Linux. I know Windows so well that it is extremely frustrating when a simple problem pops up in Linux that is very complicated to fix but could be fixed within seconds on Windows. I realize that's not necessarily Linux's fault but that still doesn't ease the frustrations. I recently bought this book (have yet to read it though) but am hoping it will come in handy, especially now that I am giving Linux another chance and have just installed Ubuntu. The book focuses on Redhat but I am hoping that it will translate well enough that it will still be usable on Ubuntu.

First of all, you should have in mind that Linux is just a kernel, and what you are probably more interested in are all the userland programs that comprise your typical Linux distribution. I think it is best to start with a general Unix introductory text, because the fundamental principles have not changed in 25 years, and it is much better to understand the core Unix system utilities and how they plug together to accomplish complex tasks, rather than waste time with all the modern Windows-like interfaces that are fashionable in Linux distributions today.

There is one "classic" Unix introduction book that I can strongly recommend, and that you can probably buy used for a dollar: Exploring the Unix System by Stephen Kochan and Patrick Wood. Make sure to get the paperback edition that is about 400 pages. Also, apparently the authors are going to release an updated version of that book -- check http://www.kochan-wood.com for updates.

Once you learn the fundamentals of Unix systems, then you would be ready to learn the modern tools available in Linux distributions. Remember that is much more important to learn the principles and philosophy that Unix was built upon, rather than attempting to memorize arcane details.

UFO sightings are not on the rise. If you have the opportunity to hang around the right circles, you'll notice that a _lot_ of persons believe they saw UFOs, ghosts and things like that. Sometimes they just want attention but often they really believe it. What has changed is that major news agencies repport those sighting. I think they figured that their credibility is not a stake anymore.

Just as an example. THIS year. Went to local music store to buy "Rage against the Machine". It was 28.99$. This past christmas I went to by a CD for my Sister, A Compaliation of Songs Inspired by Neil Gaiman this time at Amazon.com... It was over 25$ as well. Mind you this is Canadian Dollars (which I should have specified I suppose). Even still, thats too much.

Here it is right now, after christmas for 23$ http://www.amazon.ca/Wheres-Neil-When-You-Need/dp/ B000FP2IXM/sr=1-1/qid=1170947526/ref=sr_1_1/702-95 68932-7209623?ie=UTF8&s=music

thats not including a DVD, or special anything.

Mod fanboy down

This is why Most Retailers Have it at $699.

Granted SonyStyle still has it at $659, but that just means they're screwing over their retailers when people go to price match and the retailers have to sell bellow cost.

If you bust your buns making the whole project succeed, it's quite likely your boss will get a bonus or stock options, and you'll get nothing.

This concept of giving the bonus to the boss is a partial buy-in to the fallacy of management. It buys in to the concept of the boss as the "essential" cog on the team. Pay off that one big cog and the rest of the team will continue to work. Stakeholders bought in to the image, so now we have 25-year old "genius managers" making more than the underlings with 25 years of experience who actually make things tick.

Of course, this is where the "fend for yourself" concept comes in. I'm a believer in the "Die Broke" philosophy (though the book is poorly written). Point #1 is to "Quit Today", which roughly translates into "fend for yourself". If you work for a firm where bonuses are given to individuals rather than teams, talk to your bosses and be ready to leave.

I mean really, why work hard to put money in someone else's pockets? I'll give bosses some time to prove their worth, but their time is limited. When my x-mas bonus or referral bonus is 1% on "our best year ever" (with unemployment hovering at 4.5% and everyone looking for new staff), then time is up and I'll start looking for a new job.

Mind you, I think your method of playing both sides is easily overlooked. Everyone wants to a "better job", the key is understanding that you can make your current job better or find an new better job. I have heard people spread the belief that only one of these two can be successful. But I actually see two sides of the coin that are not contradictory. I can keep an up to date resume, keep an ear to job market and send out resumes all while helping my boss to improve my current work situation.

In fact, in my recent interviews, companies have been very accepting of my "desire to leave". It's well-known that the strongest employees are rarely without a job, so no one questsions my behaviour. If anyone really prods, I just tell them that "I'm working for a B-grade company and I really want to be working for an A-grade company". Funny thing is, the companies I felt were B-grade haven't called me back, but the company I felt was A-grade has called me back. It's like they can self-select :)

Don't blame global warming - the real culprit is thugs with knives: Penguins killed in sickening beach attack

We're slowly killing ourselves in our own pollution.

So my question is again, what are the stats on how much apple spends on os x development for such monumental gains, and why cannot microsoft with all its money hire the developers needed to, if not catch up, at least keep pace with apple?

The answer is "The Mythical Man Month", an essay on productivity, which, greatly summarised, boils down to the more people you put on a software job, the longer it takes and the worse the result. Small, close to the ground groups will outperform large mismanaged groups every time.

http://www.amazon.ca/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-E ngineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/ref=pd_sxp_f_ pt/701-7008168-5551547

BS! There is NO sign-out button!

If you work there, you shouldn't, because you are either lying or uninformed. There is no sign-out button. Here's the Amazon help page explaining how to sign out...

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/help/customer/display.html /702-2764071-5631217?ie=UTF8&nodeId=918808

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If you're using a public terminal, you'll want to log off, or sign out, before you leave the terminal. To do so, visit our home page, and click the link that reads, "If you're not [your name], click here." On the next page, leave the e-mail and password fields blank, and click the "Welcome" tab at the top of the page. After you've done this, your name will be removed from the home page, and your 1-Click ordering settings will be inaccessible to anyone using the same terminal after you.

We recommend that you sign out only when you feel that you must. If we cannot identify you, it's more difficult for us to identify items that might be of interest to you.
====

The icing on the cake is how you blame it on my use of Firefox... lol

There's more to it than that. Part of it is consumer needs, but part of it is consumer desires. Apple has succeeded in creating an identity for and making the iPod desirable, even if some people that use it (of whom I know a few) don't understand what it does at all. At its core, what is it? A screen and a hard drive with a rom chip that knows how to play music files stored on the hard drive.

Do you remember when the walkman first came out? Do you realize that most people now call any portable tape player (Panasonic, Sharp, Pioneer, whatever...) a Walkman even though it's the Sony brand? Sony did a remarkable job of taking a bunch of parts of a dictaphone and putting them together to create something ubiquitous. The also completely created the market for it from scratch. They packaged it in so many different forms that it became desirable to everyone. To see what I mean, check out this book. It's short but it's a really good history of a game-changing product, even if it was 'just a tape-player'.

Apple has their iPod, which is just an mp3 player. That's it (at it's core, forgive the pun there). What they have done though, is take a mp3 player (nerdy gadget) and make it desirable to the masses as an accessory, just like Sony did with the Walkman. They're even updating it like Sony did, small changes with the same base. How much different was the last walkman from the first one, really? And apple is getting flack for minor updates to a successful product. Anyways, it will be interesting to see what Zune does. Is Microsoft going to take a bite out of the market that Apple created or will gaining adoption be difficult or will it fail to create its own identity and become a Microsoft iPod (like a Panasonic Walkman)? Too many bells and whistles can take buyers away if they only really want one thing: play their music. Same problem applies to most technology. So much technology is returned because users just plain can't figure it out.

In the end I don't think it's so much about Microsoft trying to crush competition as about Microsoft trying to add a product to a successful market. It's not up to MS whether it will succeed though, in this case it will actually turn out to be a cultural decision!! (read the book, hehe).

Higher Supersition

Intellectual Impostures

A House Built On Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science

Or just read up on the Sokal Affair. Sokal's bogus article, which he got published in a leading postmodernist journal, is worth reading in its entirety. A quote from Sokal's article:

Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics

Still think I'm full of shit?

Higher Supersition

Intellectual Impostures

A House Built On Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science

Or just read up on the Sokal Affair. Sokal's bogus article, which he got published in a leading postmodernist journal, is worth reading in its entirety. A quote from Sokal's article:

Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics

Still think I'm full of shit?

Higher Supersition

Intellectual Impostures

A House Built On Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science

Or just read up on the Sokal Affair. Sokal's bogus article, which he got published in a leading postmodernist journal, is worth reading in its entirety. A quote from Sokal's article:

Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics

Still think I'm full of shit?

1. You will probably need most of the money to live, even if you live frugally, so any strategy you choose should allow you quick access to your money in the case of emergency.
2. The stock market is probably a bad idea short term, and since you need to pay off your student debt ASAP when you finish (interest rates won't always be this low,) the volatility of the stock market makes it a poor choice at this time. I'd choose the highest rate bank account I could find.
3. You haven't said what your living arrangements are. If you are living in residence, then you probably have a meal plan. Stick to it, and don't buy too much expensive food otherwise. Otherwise, invest in "The Joy of Cooking". Buying prepared meals is much more expensive than you think, and this book will give you a good start on cooking your own meals. I'm on my second copy, having worn out the first. Also invest in basic kitchen necessities.
4. There's also Cooking for Engineerson the internet. It goes into the science of making the food.

While I, on average, feel positive about new technologies and accelerating rates of change I think it is definitely worth spending some time thinking about when that can be a bad thing. The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon discusses that. I have also heard the case made that the while the quantity of change is rapidly expanding the nature of the change may be, well, changing over time.

Among these measures is to target virulence rather than the pathogen itself. The reason is that a species of pathogen can have varying virulence and you want the last virulent to win the competition for the ecological niche (human body). Ewald gives an example of a particular protein used by a bacteria to convert human lung tissue to useful food -- a protein that costs the bacteria about 5% of its budget but has huge returns. Vaccinating against this protein can let the more benign variants beat out the virulent variants for the lungs of humans, and give the human immune system the kick it needs to construct antibodies to suppress further infection.

When I was a high school student and an undergrad and had an essay to write, I would make it a practice (after the research and before I started to write) to read an essay by either George Bernard Shaw or Mark Twain. Both of them write extremely well and with crystal clarity, economy of words, and are very convincing. Then, with that ringing in my ears, I would start to write and found that it flowed more smoothly and came out better. Good editions of Shaw's plays contain the introductory essays through which he conveys why he chose to write the play, and there are collections of Mark Twain's essays available. Of course, others may suggest other authors, but these are the ones I used.

As to punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss is both clear and very entertaining, something I would have thought impossible until I read it.

Because it's not? New Tool album: $15. Recent release of Match Point: $25.

Aside from that, DVDs represent secondary sales for movies that have already been released to the general public, where CDs are primary sales.

Because it's not? New Tool album: $15. Recent release of Match Point: $25.

Aside from that, DVDs represent secondary sales for movies that have already been released to the general public, where CDs are primary sales.

Just notch the gravity up a few more and your hair will turn gold, your punch can shatter rocks, and you can fly in the sky.

For more information please refer to this.