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I recently read A Computer called Leo, which tells a story of post WW2 computer development in the UK.

The thing that stuck me most was the long cylinders of mercury used as memory, (mercury delay lines).

Amazon.co.uk: 169.98 GBP/281.66$
Amazon.com: 319.99$/193.11GBP

Not sure if the huge price difference between Home Premium and Ultimate is worth it though.

According to amazon.co.uk, since I am running XP, I could get a vista home premium upgrade for £60, and they will throw in a full windows 7 home premium free..

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_84366313_1?ie=UTF8&docId=1000321063&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=special-product-offers-3&pf_rd_r=1N0XDYG13SRJD90788PR&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=470374053&pf_rd_i=B0013O54P8

Amazon UK have put up a page with the new 120GB PS3 Slim at 249 Pounds Delivered, for the moment ill stick with my PS3 Brick :) Whos actually gonna buy one ?

Amazon UK have put up a page with the new 120GB PS3 Slim at 249 Pounds Delivered, for the moment ill stick with my PS3 Brick :) Whos actually gonna buy one ?

The Haskell code is called a "specfication", but if it is Haskell code, surely it should count as a _program_ already? How can you prove that that program is bug-free?

See Edsger W. Dijkstra's works and what followed from it, e.g.
the THE system (not on Wiki, but the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven System developed by him) and Programming: The Derivation of Algorithms by Anne Kaldewaij (which basically follows Dijkstra's methodology).

Short short synopsis: you don't prove programs. You phrase the question to be addressed, and then you derive the correct program from that. (and then you profit ;)

or even the slightly cheesy z4ck which uses a Sharp Zaurus as the key hacking device.

"Risk" by Dan Gardner ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Risk-Science-Politics-Dan-Gardner/dp/0753515539/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1248449605&sr=8-9 ) is an interesting book, with a lot to say on these matters. Basically, this is the best way for organisations like this to get into the news and thus justify their existence and funding, they whip up a scare story press release, lazy or overworked journos run it practically verbatim and the organisation gets their name in big lights all over the news. Everyone is a winner. Except the mis-informed public, of course.

you really need to look at this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Scotland-Myth-History/dp/0300136862

Wow, that's good news for the folks at "Viz" : http://www.viz.co.uk/books.html or http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/images/095485778X/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=266239&s=books

Maybe Dr House should just swear more, and then he wouldn't need so much Vicodin?

Now you just need to convince those around you that there is a medical reason (other than Tourette's Syndrome) for your chronic swearing . . .

Mao's policies are believed to have resulted in the death of some 20 million Chinese (as many people as are in entire countries like Australia and Taiwan) during the Great Chinese Famine, yet Mao's portrait still hangs in an honored place at the entrance to the Forbidden City.

That's a very glib way of stating the matter. In fact it was not Maos policies that caused so many deaths, it was the local party members implementation of those policies that did the damage. Because each areas party tried to outdo its neighbours, too much emphasis was placed on looking busy rather than producing results. The big push for iron resulted in deforestation of wide areas around towns and villages as every household had their own foundry. But of course without firewood, people could not cook. The push for food resulted in rival villages competing to produce the biggest animals, like the apocryphal pig as big as a cow. This was obviously not sustainable, and because part of the deal was to send a proportion of the food and iron to the cities, any village who had overstated their output to impress the central party and outdo their neighbours, was left with nothing for the local people to eat.

Mao did not do this, the people did it to themselves. And by and large they were happy to do so, as they were more free than they had ever been in history since Maos revolutionaries destroyed the ancient feudal emperors hold over them.

I recommend reading Wild Swans (ISBN 0-00-637492-1), which tells the story of the women in a family starting with the grandmother down to the grand-daughter. It begins in 1909 but from the descriptions, you would think it was the 1500s. By the end of the book, China was a superpower (1978). In less than 70 years they went from medieval to modern contemporary.

Because news collection just doesn't work like this at all.

This book is well worth a read on how news is collected, and becomes news. It's quite depressing reading.

Sure, do all you can to help clean up the environment and to minimize or eliminate pollution. I am all for cleaner, greener, etc. I am not for more tax burdens on top of the already increased tax burdens I and many many others are now facing in this country.

One of the best ways to reduce pollution is to tax it. Reducing pollution costs money. The purpose of a corporation is to generate profit for shareholders. Given the choice, no corporation would reduce pollution instead of returning a higher dividend. So, for pollution to be reduced, government has to be involved somehow. There are two possible ways:

• A blanket ban on technologies. Government says what you can and can't use in your business.
• A tax that charges the externality cost back to the original product and lets the market produce the most efficient solution

I recommend that everyone who is interested in this topic should read The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford, particularly chapter "Crosstown Traffic" subsection "Battling pollution on the cheap". The gist of it is that sulphur dioxide emissions were successfully reduced by taxation to the point where the tax is negligible. Initially, the corporations involved in power generation claimed that it would be impossible to do, that each ton of reduction in emissions would cost thousands of dollars. And yet, within 3 years of an auction based taxation being introduced, the cost per ton had fallen to $70.

Isn't this exactly what we all want? A market based solution to the problem, rather than overbearing government regulation?

The development of stealth technology is one of those secretive fields that has an instant fascination. I quite enjoyed reading Ben Rich's autobiography. Also Hitler's plan to atom bomb New York and The Real Heroes of Telemark were both quite interesting, casting two sides of the same global battle from very different perspectives. German scientists were some of the best in the world (not that they are so bad today..). Sometimes I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.

Mouse pads are sooo 90's. Go optical man, you never go back...

I believe the phrase that you're scrabbling for is "Once you go track you'll never go back."

Without consultation, they may make a terrible choice, and unfortunately many doctors are not trained in genetics yet.

In this case, the problem is that Doctors are not trained in statistics. The example you quote, and many more, are reference in this excellent book about the irrational decisions people make, partly because they don't understand statistics.

I thought that pliot sounded familiar. looks like this ripped it off

Oh, and I doubt that if the link was wrong it would also be included in the Amazon page for the same model netbook as well. You're basically grasping at straws.

I just finished reading an excellent book on this subject by Dan Gardner. Highly recommended.

> Hint: they're extremely expensive to manufactuer and not really portable.

Colin Gray talks about the possibility of a terrorist using a nuke in Another Bloody Century. He thought it was more likely that a terrorist would buy or be given a nuke to use rather than fabricating it due to the difficulties that you mention. He also says that nukes have a certain cultural taboo that make even a small detonation A Big Deal.

That's a great book; he talks about how cyber warfare being overhyped and also where he thinks space warfare will go. Interesting stuff.

and who is to say that our new robotic overlords wouldn't be sociopaths? They probably wouldn't have developed the same way that a child develops in human society. They would be totally alone if, like Skynet, it became self aware on it's own, and not aided by human teaching.

I am reminded of The Adolescence of P-1, a book I enjoyed reading (while i was young admittedly)

So far, i've only seen units designed for use in the US, which means they have a physically incompatible plug (and thus require a bulky adapter) and require 110V whereas european sockets provide 240V...

According to the feature list, it handles 100-240VAC/50-60Hz. So you may need a plug adapter, but the voltage isn't an issue.

Something like this, doesn't really add any significant cost, or bulk. Shipping to the UK was an extra $35 last time I looked.

Amazon MP3 is available in other countries, you just have to go through the local website, eg http://www.amazon.co.uk/mp3

I guess they just want to stop you shopping around different countries for the best price, which would be pretty good for downloadable content as delivery costs aren't a factor.

USA: "Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness" (amazon.com)
UK: "Artificial Beings: The Conscience of a Conscious Machine" (amazon.co.uk)

Same ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 number.

That would be Simon Clark's Night Of The Triffids that you would be looking for then...

I don't know about other people's baby monitor, but my digital baby monitor sounds an alarm if it loses signal (for example, you can't just switch off the base unit without an alarm sounding on the remote unit.) It also automatically switches bands if it detects interference.

My baby monitor doesn't stop me getting full rated speed out of my 802.11n network between the Airport Extreme and MacBook Pro. YMMV with other models however.

Yes, they do. John Wells - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Faithful-Spy-Alex-Berenson/dp/0099502151/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241530152&sr=8-1. !

Actually, it's not. Even taking VAT into account, prices for software in Europe is drastically higher than it is in the US. VAT in the UK is 15% flat rate (down from 17.5% a few months ago).

Proof? Look at:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Vista-Home-Premium/dp/B0015CCFLE/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1241452273&sr=1-10
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Vista-Home-Premium-Service/dp/B0013O54OE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1241452166&sr=8-2

The UK version is the equivalent of $203 dollars, the US version $139. That makes the UK version 46% more expensive- more than 3 times the rate of VAT.

I am aware of Art Therapy. I was referring more specifically to the FEMA colouring book though.

I'm sorry, this is laziness masquerading as skepticism on your part. A casual review of google search results ("Art Therapy" effectiveness) yielded plenty of references to papers & research discussing the effectiveness of art therapy. There is plenty of research out there, and simply stating "I don't believe it until I see the research," is a nice way of saying "I've never bothered to look."

Art Therapy, Research and Evidence-based Practice by Andrea Gilroy has a whole chapter devoted to "the evidence base for art therapy with children and adolescents," so you might want to start with a copy of that from your local university library if you're interested in the evidence for the efficacy of this therapy.

You could also peruse this excerpt for a discussion of art therapy that seems specific to a discussion of children coping with serious diseases, but talks significantly about the emotional & mental well-being that the art therapy can promote for children subjected to the stress, trauma, and fear of a medical diagnosis like leukemia.

There are many other references available, just a quick google search away - please avail yourselves of them.

I would take your definition of silliness more seriously if it had more logic to it than just majority opinion.

I didn't suggest "majority" opinion though, I suggested "a majority of experts' opinions" would be a reasonable criteria for determining if a complaint or objection had merit.

What other reasonable method would you suggest we follow to determine the appropriateness of this sort of material? Most people are not psychology experts, and so do not - in general - have the training & experience necessary to judge whether or not a book like this is a useful tool for child psychologists, and it is not feasible for every single person to become an expert in every field necessary to make sound judgements about these disagreements.

So in practical terms, if there is a dispute over the appropriateness of the material, and on the one side you have a group of laymen who have no particular knowledge of the field, and on the other side, you have a group of people who have spent long years research, training, and work in the field, whose judgement do you trust?

I'll weigh in with my £0.02. I was fairly agnostic until this particular episode which was a heck of a wake-up call.

I'd bought a DVD Video. Specifically, this one. Grabbed a beer, dropped it into my Windows 2003 workstation, and it *bluescreened*.

WTF? Restarted, no problems. Reinserted the DVD, bluescreen. Yay.

Turns out that autorun was causing a retarded DRM driver to try and install, which was not compatible with the OS.

Now: I'd dropped the disc in the drive with the expectation that autorun would launch media player of choice - not that it would subvert the machine. Yes, I was pretty naive.

Basically, that little wake-up call (which only caused a couple of reboots, rather than the pain of a full-on malware infection) was sufficient to get me to disable autorun on all machines I've worked on since. Users quickly get into the habit of opening Explorer, or (better) launching the application they're wanting to use in conjunction with the disc's content.

AC as I've changed pass and don't have it at work.

What's next, a seven-bladed razor?

Maybe you should suggest that to this guy.

Life already decided to imitate the Onion: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fusion-Manual-Razor-Gillette/dp/B000GE5712 (for what it's worth, it's actually a good razor)

Peter Wright did a book about MI5's work ("spycatcher" - you'll have trouble getting a copy in the UK) that seems quite informative...

Why would someone in the UK have trouble getting a copy? You've linked to Amazon.co.uk, and there are 4 new and 156 used available, with prices down to a penny (+postage). That seems pretty good for a book that's been out of print for 20 years.

Peter Wright did a book about MI5's work ("spycatcher" - you'll have trouble getting a copy in the UK) that seems quite informative...

Before they were books (and after they were books), they were radio plays. In the second set of fits (now called Secondary Phase) there are some significant differences which never made it into the books, mainly due to missed deadlines on the first book. The above quote is from that version.

The complete series can be imported wherever you like. Well, complete except for a bit on Magrathea where Marvin hums like Pink Floyd which is cut from all pressings due to rights issues and will probably never be reinstated within the lifetime of anyone alive today. Arthur's awe of being on an alien planet for the first time and the discovery of the remains of the whale are a casualty of this cut. Someone has a couple copies of this scene on-line somewhere at differing qualities recorded from the first airing.

Also there are some differences in the UK edition of one of the books as well. There's more adult language in the UK edition (Arthur is called an "arsehole" instead of "knee-biter") and the bit about Belgium is not there (the Rory is for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Fuck" in a Serious Screenplay in the UK edition). I haven't tried buying the books from Amazon UK for delivery to the US. I do know they won't ship toys (unless they're attached to a DVD box set) and most electronics.

I've just compared the listing for Brokeback Mountain on the US Amazon site with that on the UK Amazon site. I can't see a sales rank on the US version, but there's one on the UK version.

While some Americans seem to have trouble with some "Britishisms"; I think there's a rather large and dedicated "Brit-com" fan base here who either have no problem with them or to whom a bit of cultural "went over my head" doesn't detract from their enjoyment too much.

I grew up watching plenty of British TV including: Dr. Who; The Tomorrow People; Are You Being Served; Monty Python's Flying Circus; The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy; Fresh Fields; May to December; The Prisoner; Benny Hill (didn't like that one so much); Yes Minister; The Young Ones; and more. Maybe I didn't get all the references in terms of cultural significance (who the hell WAS Reginald Maulding; and why were the Pythons so convinced that his naughty bits were particularly naughty?)

As I grew older, I never lost my love of British television. (I think that Spaced is possibly the second funniest TV series I've ever watched ... next to Red Dwarf.

At any rate, I am by far not the only American who enjoys British television and humor (though I may be a bit on the extreme end, owning a region free dvd player with PAL to NTSC conversion and ordering regularly from amazon.co.uk). While I do understand that some folks may not quite get it or like it, my point was not to underestimate the size and loyalty of potential fan base here.

Actually, if you've got some basic knowledge of ordinary differential equations, Stogatz has a very readable text on non-linear differential equations and how fractals naturally arise as the stable solutions of chaotic systems.

Unless I miss my guess, the PC ASP is for a box. No monitor, no camera, no sound, just a box. A Mac has everything you need built it

Searching for "all in one pc"

First result on a google search,
http://www.cadar.co.uk/
Second result on a google search,
http://www.trustedreviews.com/pcs/review/2008/09/29/HP-TouchSmart-IQ500-All-In-One-PC/p1
Third result on a google search,
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-Blu-ray-Drive-Vista-Premium/dp/B001IDYW7A

I could go on, but you get my point. I don't really think you have much of a point there, I can easily get the same as a regular PC.

plus you don't have to suffer their damn UI.

I personally find OS X's UI annoying. So it doesn't fit my needs, never mind the fact the OS doesn't run some of the applications I use and others that it does run, it runs terribly.

"Pretty Baby" is available from Amazon in the UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pretty-Baby-DVD-Keith-Carradine/dp/B000KQGX46 and also by the look of it as an import from the US. Another film that is available from Amazon in the UK and therfore must be legal to watch is "The Blue Lagoon" from 1980 which also contains footage of nude children. So I guess it is was and still is legal to look at nude children in the UK and the US from 1978-1980 (when the films were released) or maybe it's only legal if the films have Brooke Sheilds in them - then again, maybe Peadophiles didn't exist back then - huh!

Extra Slim Filter Tips should definitely be considered when purchasing filters.

Actually there is good deal on at Amazon currently only £11.99: Extra Slim Filter.

I'm a bit worried about the 4 used & new available from £5.85

You could, you know, purchase them?

Not shows that haven't been released on DVD yet, you can't. If I could buy a DVD of the current series of Battlestar Galactica, well, I'd probably still download it, but it would be nice to have the option.

"Instead, they went the other way, and encouraged Fannie and Freddie to give mortgages to people who had no business getting one. Well, once the two biggest lenders in the country start doing this, what do you expect everyone else to do? This is what caused the wholesale inflation of the housing market, and the bursting of this bubble has caused this economic downturn."

That's a bizarre viewpoint. I'm pretty sure that Fannie and Freddie were not the primary cause of the international housing bubble, nor was the housing bubble the cause of the widespread delinking of the financial sector from reality, which was enabled by Reagan and Thatcher's wave of deregulation in the 1980s.

The problem was derivatives, not morgages. For some perspective, read a book like Traders, Guns & Money.

I'm sure it's comforting to be able to find a way to blame poor people for the massive fraud and corruption perpetrated by the ultra-rich banking elite... but I find myself unable to perform the required mental gymnastics.

The Welfare State We're In (another link) describe parts of current governmental policies which while maybe meant to be good, fail miserably. Some of them are the areas you mention.

That of course only if a) I understand you post correctly and b) I'm not mistaken about the book and author (I did not read it, I've just read some longer summary of it, then forgot the exact name) - hopefully sufficient for ./ posting :)

By the way, I do not say that paying taxes is either good or bad but I do tend to agree with you if I take a look at the current (or I can even say almost any) government of my country and see what did they achieve with all the money the taxpayers are paying.

You could, you know, purchase them?

Amazon has no problem shipping from the US to Europe, so I doubt it's a problem in the other direction either.

Screens don't cost that much. This player has an OLED screen, FM radio, microphone, and 15h battery life. Small like a shuffle for about the same price. No AAC support or PC-rendered voiceover, though.

In the UK 3kw appliances are common, especially kettles and electric heaters.

In the UK 3kw appliances are common, especially kettles and electric heaters.

In the UK, where we have 240v mains 2kw vacuum cleaners are common. They clean really well too - though the scenario in the return of the pink panther involving Inspector Closseu, a parrot and a vacuum cleaner is certainly a possibility.

The Witcher Enhanced Edition came with a short story and a making of DVD. Some people are still doing it but it has moved to a collector's edition model so sometimes costs extra.

I do remember being bitterly dissapointed when I found that Neverwinter Nights 2 didn't come with a real manual. For RPGs the manual is often an essential reference for things like skills and spells.

1. It's cheaper to buy the physical item
2. The DRM encumbered nature of today's video games makes it almost essential to have the physical disk and box, if only for proof that you own the damned thing.
3. The pirated version of the game can be less hassle than downloading the game.
4. You have to go to disparate sources to get different types of game downloaded.

Once these issues have been overcome we will be downloading games, but at the moment it seems a long way off. The publisher's of games seem to control the download distribution of their games much more closely than record companies do and let's not forget the games industry is still growing they have no particular reason to change their business model.