Slashdot Mirror

Seconded.... I had a TI-85 in HS, an HP48GX in college engineering, then a few years ago when I took the FE/EIT exam, the prep guide forums recommended the Casio

http://www.amazon.com/Casio-Advanced-Scientific-Calculator-Textbook/dp/B000A3IAHM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384664856&sr=8-1&keywords=casio+calculator+scientific

Sad that I haven't really had a chance to use any decent calculators in the "real world" outside of engineering examinations, though.

Incidentally, the NCEES FE reference guide is an awesome cheat-sheet for engineering math, physics, chemistry, etc.
http://cbt.ncees.org/get-the-new-fe-reference-handbook-for-cbt/
Which is awesome to carry around on your kindle or whatever "just in case"

If you're patient, you can remove ethanol from E10. Add 2% water and pour into a separatory funnel. Then, wait 1 hour and look for 3 layers to form in the funnel. The bottom one is water. The second from the bottom is Ethanol (pure grain, but wouldn't drink it). The top layer is the gasoline. This will save your chainsaws, weed eaters, lawnmowers, ATVs, and maybe even motorcycles.

The largest glassware I could find would only hold 3 liters at a time (15L is about a motorcycle tank), so you'll need several to get the job done in any usable volume. You can also use a similar approach to determine the actual ethanol mixture in the fuel.

HP-35s. Not as good as the original HP-35 u some respects, but plenty usable:

http://www.amazon.com/HP-F2215AA-ABA-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B000TDRHG8

Looking at the app, this isn't the voluminous $500 set that's been digitized. It's the ~$110 watered down version for home chefs. The home version is a bit more than just a "two-volume addition" tacked onto the original. It's a compendium of simpler recipes taken from the original volumes with preparations that gel well with what regular chefs can get their hands on.

It's still a fantastic book for wannabe kitchen scientists but it seems the author got a little too excited in writing his sensational headline.

best part is you don't have to buy the $500 book. Use world catalog and find out which is your closest library that has it.

http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=modernist+cuisine+the+art+and+science+of+cooking

This is a "modern" (or Modernist) cookbook, so the recipes inside are going to be closer to what you'd find in a restaurant that uses an obscure adjective for it's title rather than what you'd see in your grandmother's kitchen. If the idea of cooking a beautiful cut of salmon in a Ziploc bag seems blasphemous, or using a digital scale instead of an elephant-shaped measuring cup is akin to high treason, you may not be ready to make the jump.

Modernist Cuisine at Home introduces a consolidated set of kitchen tools and gadgets that the home chef can reasonably afford. Don't have the funds for the laboratory-grade centrifuge featured in "Modernist Cuisine?" No problem. Not only does MCAH omit the prohibitively expensive tools from its recipes, but many of them are the same recipes found in the original, redone for the home cook. MCAH even goes as far as offering several options at varying price ranges for the equipment used within.

The same goes for the ingredients. MCAH mostly does away with the laundry list of exotic spices and chemicals featured in many "modernist" cookbooks and instead relies on ingredients you can find either at the local grocery store, or in reasonable quantities online. For the ingredients you are probably less familiar with (malic acid? agar agar?) there is a two-page spread detailing what each does, where it comes from, and what it costs. In many cases, the recipes will list alternatives if you choose not to add their recommendations to your shopping list.

[purchaser review]

Looking at the app, this isn't the voluminous $500 set that's been digitized. It's the ~$110 watered down version for home chefs. The home version is a bit more than just a "two-volume addition" tacked onto the original. It's a compendium of simpler recipes taken from the original volumes with preparations that gel well with what regular chefs can get their hands on.

It's still a fantastic book for wannabe kitchen scientists but it seems the author got a little too excited in writing his sensational headline.

Among the top features that the Modernist Cuisine app comes with are the high-resolutions pictures and the ability to search within the app's own information which will also fetch extra data from Wikipedia and other web services.

Wow, an app that can search its own information! And use that cool web resources like Wikipedia!

As someone who admired the photography from the original book, though, the high-res photography is awesome.

Unfortunately, that's about all the book was good for, at least unless you're some professional chef with a large budget and a bunch of fancy equipment. I find it hilarious that TFA makes it sound like a regular cooking and recipe app:

the recipe cards dynamically adjust the measure of ingredients you'll need to yield a given number of servings, then add these items to a shopping list.

Have people even looked at the book? The exotic ingredients used in many recipes aren't exactly the sort of things you can find at your typical supermarket. Even if you have the centrifuge and other fancy equipment needed to prepare some things, you're going to have to special order a lot of ingredients... not just pack your iPhone in your purse and head off to the grocery store.

The hype for this book was huge, with people claiming that it revolutionize the way we would cook and introduce a whole new "scientific" approach to cooking. That was complete nonsense -- it's more about fancy technology and fancy ingredients, with lots of fun pictures. If you like $600 coffee-table books, by all means, get a copy... or maybe get the photos for a steal in an $80 iPad app.

I know I'm a dissenting voice on this book, but all the blather about using "science" in cooking really bothered me. I'm actually the scientific type of cook -- I have many digital thermometers, scales, a pH meter, and many other precision devices, along with a "lab notebook" (journal) of my kitchen "experiments."

But this book is more about presenting pretentious culinary "culture" that uses lots of technology as if it were "science." That's not science. It's just somebody's wacky cooking vision. I'm not saying the food is bad, but claiming that their approach is "better" is rarely backed up by any data... therefore, it's hardly "scientific."

Anyhow, I could go on about this for some time, and already have here. But from my experience with this book, I'm a little hesitant about recommending the $80 app, unless you just like paying that much for a lot of pretty pictures.

Buying Firewall used to put you on the federal watch list.

http://www.amazon.com/Firewall-The-Iran-Contra-Conspiracy-Cover-up/dp/0393318605

(I know one person that ended up moving over the harassment he got when he shot a neighbors cat. Also, every potted plant and his entire lawn died. It's assumed that one or more persons put herbicide on all of them.)

Sounds like your friend decided to back down. Another option would have been to simply take the necessary steps to ensure that the sanctity and security of his home were no longer violated by either neighbors or their unwelcome animals.

Step 1: Surround the house with 5,000-lumen security lights - http://www.amazon.com/Whelen-Super-LED-Floodlight-5000-Lumens/dp/B004HL5W7Y
Step 2: Install motion sensors near the house connected to 105dB sirens - http://simplisafe.com/105-decibel-alarm-siren
Step 3: Utilize ArduCopter HEXA at high altitude to deliver daily 3.3lb payload of salt to enemy neighbors' yards - http://www.canadadrones.com/ArduCopter-Hexa-KIT-HEAVY-LIFT-Full-Electronics-p/ac-hexa-kit-full-hl1.htm
Step 4: Sue to tear out all boundary trees in enemy neighbors' yards
Step 5: Replace your potted plants with well fertilized plants all along the property line (ensuring to-the-letter compliance with local/HOA requirements)
Step 6: Operate multiple wireless routers (properly secured of course) at all frequencies and channels as close to enemy neighbors' houses as possible

A few weeks or months of being sleep deprived, blind, and deaf, losing their trees, watching every other form of plant life in their yard slowly die, smelling the shit-smell gently wafting over from your new plants, and being completely unable to maintain a functional wireless device, they'll either surrender or move (i.e. surrender). That or they'll be driven to do something terribly illegal which will land them in jail.

here ya go...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16821121001

http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-3-5In-1-44MB-Pre-Fmt-10Pk/dp/B0000511BI/

Just as they get to the point where they can admit there's been no warming for 17 years and started coming up with excuses, here comes another "estimate".

Haha, I don't think any scientists made that claim. Just a bunch of cranks who think measuring data from 1998 isn't cherry picking.

Double down on stupid.

Psychologists have a term for that.

I received an unsolicited email from Amazon letting me know about the exciting opportunity for a systems engineer position for this project (I'm only presuming, I don't know for sure). Not exactly my cup of tea, but the SSBI requirement along with '+1 years' in all of the technical requirements scared me off. (i.e. they're throwing out a really wide net for "talent"). Also, shift work? No thanks!

The really interesting part of this to me is that the requirements for clearance imply that first tier engineers will be potentially exposed to sensitive data. Has Amazon learned nothing from the Snowden exposures? If not, here's a summary:

* Encrypt your data
* Compartmentalize access
* First tier pizza box coroners shouldn't have access to sensitive data. They don't need it, they shouldn't have it. If they do, its because your system isn't design to be secure. Simply creating a 'new' separate cloud only compartmentalizes the risk.

I'll even go as far to make a joking assert that it'd probably be more secure in the existing AWS cloud since attackers would have to sift through petabytes of crap before they found anything interesting.

There should be technology in place to ensure that a non-cleared engineer (or even a bad actor http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/ could be hired for this role.

My name is XXXXXXXXXX, and I am a recruiting coordinator with Amazon Web Services. We recently reviewed your profile and our hiring team is interested in speaking with you about a new project that we are working on. We are looking for candidates who are interested in obtaining and maintaining a US Government Security Clearance and we feel that your background and skills are a good fit for the role and would like to schedule a phone interview with you. Please be aware that because AWS runs in a 24x7 environment, all System Engineer and Support Engineer candidates will need to be open to shift work if hired.

I have included a high level job description below to give you a general idea about the roles we have in AWS. For more specific information about Amazon Web Services and our teams, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/. Please note, we have other positions available, so if this role doesnâ(TM)t pique your interest, please let us know what you are interested in and we can find a more suitable opportunity.

These roles would require you to relocate to the Seattle, WA or Herndon, VA area. Please let us know what your location preference is so that we may find an appropriate team. We will provide relocation assistance and more information will be available further into the process.

If you are interested in learning more and talking with a member of the team, please send me your availability for a phone interview (between 10:00am-4:00pm PST) for the next two weeks, as well as the best phone number to use for this conversation. Please keep in mind that phone interviews can take up to 75 minutes to complete. We are looking to fill this position as soon as possible, so please let me know if you have any questions or concerns that I can address.

Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

Amazon Web Services is a dynamic and rapidly growing business within Amazon.com. We are building some of the largest and most complex distributed systems in the world, and we need world class people to help us implement and operate them.

We provide organizations with building block web services that allow them to innovate faster and operate their software more cost-effectively. These services-in-the-cloud include on-demand compute capacity, storage, content delivery, querying of structured data, message queuing, and more.

We have high standards for our computer systems as well as our employees: our systems are highly secure, highly reliable, highly available, and must function at massive scale; our employees are super smart, driven to serve customers, and

If any concern should know better than falling for the cloud BS, especially one that's managed by another, private concern, it's the CIA. Jesus, even I, Mister Nobody, don't put anything in any cloud that matters, and keep my own valuable (to me) data on my own servers...

Ironically, since Amazon has a Server Access Logging system (which can be fairly robust and powerful, if you set it up), there's an argument to be made that they are a step ahead of the NSA on that score...

The one (slightly) novel aspect of this, presumably also made possible because the workload parallelized well, is the use of Spot Instances. As the name suggests, these aren't Amazon's standard fixed-price instances; but are rather instances whose price changes according to demand.

Even that isn't novel. Quoting some work done last year "Running a 10,000-node Grid Engine Cluster in Amazon EC2": "Also, we mainly requested for spot instances because ..."

Doesn't make it less interesting for me though.

I feel your pain! ST: Generations had way too many problems. I feel they fixed a lot of the problems in First Contact. The whole Queen Borg argument aside, I thought that movie was pretty well done.

I do love Star Trek, especially TNG, DS9, and the new movies. I find myself having to isolate each episode (or movie) from any other episode (or movie) so I can enjoy it. There really is no continuity. One of the best things that illustrates that is Nitpickers TNG Guide. I had an older copy of that book and really enjoyed it.

The one (slightly) novel aspect of this, presumably also made possible because the workload parallelized well, is the use of Spot Instances. As the name suggests, these aren't Amazon's standard fixed-price instances; but are rather instances whose price changes according to demand.

You make a bid (specifying maximum price/hour, number and type of instances, availability zones, etc.) If the spot price falls at or below your maximum, your instance starts running. Should it exceed your maximum, your instance gets terminated. Using these things obviously requires a tolerance for server outages far above even the shoddiest physical systems; but if you can divide your problem space into relatively small, discrete, chunks, and get the results off the individual servers once computed, you won't lose more than a single chunk per shutdown, and spot instances can be crazy cheap, depending on demand at the time. My impression is that Amazon offers them whenever they don't have enough reserved instances to fill a given area, and will pretty much keep offering them as long as they pay better than they cost in additional electricity and cooling, so if you are willing to bottom feed, and potentially wait, there are some bargains to be had.

Funny story...

I love food, and I love sharing meals with friends. But many of my meals are purely functional. It would be awesome if there was a meal replacement for those purely functional meals.

Me too. Have you Tried this stuff?

You want a liquid meal replacement that's not sweet?

I have good news! Have you ever heard of this thing called "milk"? Looking at whole milk, 150kcal/8oz means you need about 36 oz of it to replace a meal. More if you're large, less if you'll be doing other snacking and drinking something other than water between "meals". And you can even go overboard, and mix powered milk into your liquid milk... That's the basic component of Carnation Instant Breakfast and similar.

Also, you're free to dilute meal-replacement drinks with water (or milk) if you find them too rich or thick, and you'd be amazed how little you need to go from super-sweet to tasteless. I guarantee you won't even do 2:1. That will reduce aftertaste as well.

I agree about the horrible (after)taste of Ensure, Boost, and other popular products right now, but there are many great-tasting ones, too. Toping my list is Nutrament, esp Vanilla:

  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015552FM/

Second would be basic chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla powder, like Ovaltine, Nesquik, but I prefer store brands.

Third would be meal powders like Carnation Instant Breakfast, and all the store brands with the same purpose. Since you mix it yourself, you can mix as much milk and water into it as your taste buds allow.

And I'd dare say none of those have any nasty aftertastes like the non-dairy meal replacement drinks.

The need for carbohydrates has never been established. True, the body needs fuel, but the body can burn fats and protein. The brain is actually designed to run more efficiently on ketones than sugars. People have lived healthily for years on meat-only and mostly meat diets. However, if you don't take in carbs you pretty much need fats and oils for fuel.

I'm more worried about the soy content than anything else; There seems to be strong evidence that lots of soy is antagonistic to testosterone balances.

As for vegetarianism: http://www.amazon.com/The-Vegetarian-Myth-Justice-Sustainability/dp/1604860804 . This is a great basis for lively discussion from a former vegan.

If you want an all-in-one food, it's available. Most drug stores stock "liquid nutrition" drinks which offer a balanced diet. In Japan, such products are popular. Calorie Mate, from Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. "Handy solid type Balance protective foods which gives your lips. Each 100-kcal serving contains Protein, Lipid, Carbohydrate, 6 different types of minerals, 11 different vitamins, Contains dietary fiber." Popular with Japanese salarymen who eat lunch at their desks.

I don't see how "soylent" is superior to any of the other meal-replacements we've had for the past half-century. In fact, with all the problems people have had adjusting to the soylent diet, it sounds like the old ones were vastly superior.

I've known people who have survived entirely off of items like reliable old Nutrament, after surgical procedures made it too difficult for them to eat *any* solid foods for weeks... I've seen nurses preparing some generic forms of Carnation Instant Breakfast (powder), as meals for their feeble patients. And I've seen kids eating nothing but lots of chocolate milk for days at a time. With none of those do you need to FORCE yourself to consume them, nor do you get gastrointestinal distress after a couple days of use, and you certainly don't waste 1/3rd of the calories you consume.

Of course 30-days is really going to be too short of a time-frame to determine the long-term suitability of any meal-replacement. A little bit of up-front weight-loss sounds like a good thing for a few days, but *months* of losing weight would be a clear sign of a major show-stopping problem with the concoction. The same goes for the nutritional balance, as 30 days without fruits and vegetables won't show obvious medical signs, but would be obvious after months as your whole body turns strange colors...

It seems the only thing Soylent has going for it, is clever marketing and extreme claims, with a name that grabs reporter's attention.

Besides Linux Kernel Newbies, there's also The Linux Documentation Project, which has en emphasis on users and system administrators but might be useful for new developers.

There are also many good books for developers:
Robert Love - Linux Kernel Development: a very good introduction, doesn't require much previous experience or knowledge about the Kernel;
Bovet and Cesati - Understanding the Linux Kernel: more thorough and advanced than the previous one;
Corbet, Rubini and Kroah-Hartman - Linux Device Drivers (this one is available for free under a Creative Commons license).

Among coutless other resources you can easily find online for all sorts of different projects and subsystems, including mailing lists.

--

The reason there is no single centralised place, or hub, for developers is because Linux is not really developed as a single big project. Many features and subsystems have their own websites, frameworks, development tools, mailing lists etc. I am not even sure how you would define "basic kernel code". A good place to start is writing device drivers, looking at a lot of kernel code, and fiddling with it.

The first part sounded as if it came form The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
That is a compliment.

I listen to it at least twice per year in my car, instead of listening to some stoopid radio show.

Another good book that deals with talking and listening is the following:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/1451663889

Don't let the title mislead you, most of the advice given here, is equally valuable when dealing with adults.

Try reading Tess Roeder's book. I recommend you give yourself a crash course in Project Management and give the PMBOK a read. These skills will help you communicate.

You also want to learn some problem-solving strategies. If your workplace doesn't use something like the Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Decision Analysis method, they need to. It will establish a common language and methodology for approaching a problem. 100% of the problem isn't always you; in many organizations, communication has become comfortable but is still terribly poor. In those situations, when you try to intentionally improve you will make the problem worse because suddenly your communications skills will exceed the organization's; you must commit to also leading a communications improvement in the organization if this happens.

Try reading Tess Roeder's book. I recommend you give yourself a crash course in Project Management and give the PMBOK a read. These skills will help you communicate.

You also want to learn some problem-solving strategies. If your workplace doesn't use something like the Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Decision Analysis method, they need to. It will establish a common language and methodology for approaching a problem. 100% of the problem isn't always you; in many organizations, communication has become comfortable but is still terribly poor. In those situations, when you try to intentionally improve you will make the problem worse because suddenly your communications skills will exceed the organization's; you must commit to also leading a communications improvement in the organization if this happens.

Try reading Tess Roeder's book. I recommend you give yourself a crash course in Project Management and give the PMBOK a read. These skills will help you communicate.

You also want to learn some problem-solving strategies. If your workplace doesn't use something like the Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Decision Analysis method, they need to. It will establish a common language and methodology for approaching a problem. 100% of the problem isn't always you; in many organizations, communication has become comfortable but is still terribly poor. In those situations, when you try to intentionally improve you will make the problem worse because suddenly your communications skills will exceed the organization's; you must commit to also leading a communications improvement in the organization if this happens.

Buy it, and read it. Then read it again.
This book changed my life. I had no idea how bad I was at dealing with people until I read it. I re-read it at least once a year.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671723650

Amazon Prime has all of Downtown Abbey for free...

Amazon Prime is $6.58 a month, cheaper than Netflix, plus you get the benefit of free 2 day shipping with no minimum purchase to boot.

Delivery of physical documents remains a vital service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that many people do not have computers.

So why should people with computers subsidize people without computers? Or, if we do, wouldn't it be easier to just buy them an Obamaphone, or a cheap computer? If they need to print, can't they do it somewhere like Kinko's or a library? (I seldom need to print anything.)

Admit it, delivery of physical pieces of paper - who usually have no particular worth - burns a lot of fuel, and requires a lot of human labor. It just doesn't make sense today. But if you live somewhere far, far away - so far that even the satellite Internet is not an option - then perhaps you need to sign up for USPS delivery, and pay for it as you pay for any other service. USPS will print your email, securely, put it in an envelope, and will deliver that envelope to you. Will that make the recipient happy?

Not everyone has a computer or can afford an internet connection nor should they be expected to do so. Perhaps many years down the line electronic delivery of documents will become ubiquitous and computers will become sufficiently cheap but that time will probably require another generation or two to die off before it happens.

What year have you arrived from, 1910? A computer today can be purchased under $100 - this is less than I usually leave in a single grocery store. How much lower do you want the price to go? If you cannot afford the free WiFi connection in your city, there are free hotspots. I do not advocate cell phone connections, they are overpriced; I don't have one myself. But a generic Internet link can be had for very little - and it can be shared among tens of families, if they are so poor. Just tell them the WiFi password, or run it open. Is $2-3/mo too much?

There is absolutely no reason why access to a computer cannot be expected. Car ownership is often expected - and that is far harder to accomplish. Anyone can own, or share, a computer. Anyone can own a free email address. It cannot possibly hurt anyone to check his email once a week. Paper mail, like horses, and like open fire, and like hunting for food, should be left to special cases - to enthusiasts, or to professionals, or to businesses that need the paper and that are willing to pay for it. A common man has no use of that paper, and it ends up in trash. Why are we, as a society, so enthusiastic about mail? It is insecure, it is unreliable, and it is slow.

When you see "Russian" with "USB key" you should start by mangling the USB ports on your computer so they are unusable. A Leatherman Wingman will be adequate to do sufficient damage. Or you could try this.

Read Society Of The Mind by Eric Harry, an awesome book about 8 foot tall robot astronauts and other AI themes.

http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-America-Boston/dp/B00006LI3R/

has all you need to know about Corporate America. The stories I could tell.

Read "Bin Laden - The Man Who Declared War on America. This was published in 1999, before 9/11, and as a result is a reasonably hype-free biography. It quotes bin Laden during the years he was building up his organization.

I'm doing this from memory, but one of the key points bin Laden made to his followers was that, to defeat the United States, it had to be weakened first. He was writing this in the 1990s. (Situation in the 1990s: USSR was history, previous US war was four days of total victory over Iraq in Kuwait, balanced budget in US, US economically dominant in world, most of world wanted to be more like US.) He discusses how to weaken the US. Bin Laden specifically discusses how to make the US paranoid and more heavy-handed, and thus a less competent opponent and a less desirable alternative to Islam. That was the goal of his terror campaign.

Mission accomplished.

"liberal fascists". Utter language abuse.

Not so much, no. Apparently there is some history you aren't acquainted with. As used in contemporary America, liberal politics are associated with "progressive" politics. Fascism was also aligned with progressivism.

Rich Lowry on Liberal Fascism

In his brilliant new book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg (a colleague of mine) demonstrates how the opposite is the case, that fascism was a movement of the left and that liberal heroes like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were products of what Goldberg calls “the fascist moment” in America early in the 20th century. ...

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left. ...

On the other hand, the progressive movement of the early 20th century looked to Mussolini as an inspiration and shared intellectual roots with European fascism, including an appreciation of the “top-down socialism” of Otto von Bismarck. Goldberg eviscerates Woodrow Wilson as the closest we have ever had to a fascist president. Wilson and his supporters welcomed World War I as an opportunity to expand the state, instituting “war socialism” and a far-reaching crackdown on dissent.

FDR picked up where Wilson left off. The crisis of the Great Depression was the occasion for reviving “war socialism.” The man who ran the National Recovery Administration was an open admirer of Mussolini, and the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies had their roots in World War I and the classic fascist impulse to mobilize society and put it on a war footing.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change

is it true enders game is on there as well? what else was on it ?

"Ender's Game" was not on it. Nor should it have been. It doesn't really teach much about leadership, other than some people just magically have it. That is the opposite of the military's belief that leadership is a skill that can be learned. "Starship Troopers" was the only sci-fi book on the list. The only other work of fiction that I recall, was The Defense of Duffer's Drift.

I don't remember many other books on the list, but two that made an impact on me were both by S. L. A. Marshall: The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation, and Men Against Fire. Anyone trained to lead soldiers in war should be required to read these two books.

is it true enders game is on there as well? what else was on it ?

"Ender's Game" was not on it. Nor should it have been. It doesn't really teach much about leadership, other than some people just magically have it. That is the opposite of the military's belief that leadership is a skill that can be learned. "Starship Troopers" was the only sci-fi book on the list. The only other work of fiction that I recall, was The Defense of Duffer's Drift.

I don't remember many other books on the list, but two that made an impact on me were both by S. L. A. Marshall: The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation, and Men Against Fire. Anyone trained to lead soldiers in war should be required to read these two books.

Well said. The analysis of the rationale for allowing veterans to vote was especially interesting, thanks.

Actually, I liked both the book and the movie, but for obviously very different reasons. Suffice it to say that the book was mined for characters, names, and context, and then an entirely different story was told. That sometimes happens in movies. An example of that happening in a good way is in Children of Men, which is really a terrific riff on the ideas and characters in the novel of the same name by PD James, but isn't the same story at all.

Why I liked Starship Troopers, the movie, is because the acting is superb. The plot is childish, the Nazism stupid, the splatterfest is stomach-turning, and the gratuitous nudity is sophmoric, but those actors are terrific, across the board. If you want to see the difference between having an A-team ensemble cast vs. a partial A-team, just watch any of the two sequels.

I wish I could enumerate the various ways the screenwriters took liberties with The Dean's work, but /. does not allow posts of that length. Suffice to say that the film was as much an adaptation of the book of the same name as it was of another book, Cornflowers by the Roadside. Or the Iliad.

Starship Troopers (the book) was not RAH's masterpiece by any means - it was intended and sold as pulp sci-fi to grab a teen market and make a quick buck, as many of his works were. He was unapologetically a literary prostitute in this era, but managed to work into that a hint of flavor of what he was really about.

There was no reason I can tell to associate his name with this movie other than to sell movie tickets and DVDs to his fans. It named some of the characters in the book (sometimes changing their gender). It had some of the words. It had Bugs Vs Humans. That's about it. It was a famous author's name exploitation CGI schockfest. And yes, I bought the movie tickets and the videos anyway, to keep my collection complete. So it worked.

I think this answers your question: The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Since the earlier poster brought up Silicon, why do you suppose Bell Labs was researching the electrical properties of silicon? To produce better diode rectifiers. The idea of actually making a three-terminal switch was a long term goal that they got to a lot quicker than they expected.

Bell Labs was in fact funneling a lot of military money into developing better tubes. And they were funneling a lot of military money into investigating silicon devices. They had more than enough money to do both. The military (and Bell Labs management because they could see the future in solid-state phone switches) funded the basic research to put themselves in a position where the applications were on the horizon.

A really great book documenting this amazing time is Crystal Fire. http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Transistor-Information-Technology/dp/0393318516

Don't forget the Diamond cables.

When I purchased this cable, I had to give up my apartment, but I knew it would be totally worth it. It arrived in a UPS truck at my box on the side of 5th Street. The man stepped out and handed my a box. Inside was a 6.56 foot cable. I hooked it up to my small flatscreen I kept in the back of my box. Soon everything was sucked into the cable. I am reviewing this from the year 3012.

A lefty wrote tbis.

Most of you are akin to chimpanzees jumping at the behest of memes to strip freedoms in the support of your meme's attempt at dominance.

Grow up and leave that tens of millenia old crap on the dustheap of history where it belongs. We, who do not recognize consenting crimes, are currently twisting the dagger in the corpse of anti-gay and anti-marijuana laws.

Come on over to the winning side! "Imagine how stupid you will look in 50, 100, or 150 years."

By the way, to FBI profilers, I don't use Tor and have smoked marijuana precisely 2x in my life, once in Jamaica and once in Ann Arbor. This is inconceivable to you, of course, and to most dear readers, no doubt, who think nobody thinks this way without ulterior motives. You all are sad.

If by IP-connected TV you mean a cheap laptop and an HDMI cable, then...

Oh, and it plays games too. Civ 5 in the living room FTW.

An "IP-connected" TV is just 44 dollars away.

Haha. So the fact that I did not take the time (and 40-plus pages - an unusual size for a slashdot posting) to provide a definitive, line-by-line critique of Marx's entire body of work demonstrates to you an apparent lack of understanding? Fah.

Slashdot comments are, at best, a shorthand. I suppose that all the other philosophers, mathematicians, and social scientists who have completely eviscerated Marx's pathetic lack of logic, misunderstanding of the business world around him, and irrational rantings (which are more about the remaining dregs of post-feudal aristocracies in Europe, which were valid targets of complaint, than about the economic systems that were just beginning arise in his day) also don't "have any understanding of anything he wrote". That's amusing.

So I'll put the discussion on the other foot: Your statement demonstrates that you have neither read nor understood anything about complex adaptive systems (upon which I based my original comments), which, even if Marx actually had any connection with the real world of his day (having never actually had a real job in the 'evil capitalistic system' and spent literally his whole adult life in the warm comfy confines of an extremist self-flagellating society), makes both his work and the work of many _real_ classical economists obsolete, as they nearly all are analyzing linear or at best simple mathematical approximations of how real economies and polities work.

  I suggest you spend a year or so studying, yourself. You can start with the citations on CAS from Wikipedia, then a few dozen various publications from the Santa Fe Institute. Then read "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos ", some of which is controversial among CAS researchers, but worthy of review.

Then, come back in a year and tell me how Marx even makes sense, especially in the context of modern society. Till then, don't bother me. And, if you want, feel free to read "Accellerando", which takes the concept of money from second derivative linear measure to an object-relational complex that incorporates all aspects of an exchange - an intriguing idea.

Let's see, one of the first hits on Amazon for a core i5 ultrabook is this, at $584.98, as opposed to $1088.99 for the Surface Pro.

So you compare it to a system that is twice as heavy, has less than half the amount of pixels on the screen, a HDD instead of SSD, no active stylus and a slower GPU and are confused as to why this would make it $500 cheaper? That's great if you don't care about those things or don't need those things but come on don't be obtuse, it's pretty obvious that these features have a significant price premium. You can get a Chromebook for half the price of that Asus you linked too and you would have to make similar sacrifices in specs and features for that too, but again you can hardly say the Asus is bad value just because you can do without the elements that make it more expensive than the Chromebook.

Let's see, one of the first hits on Amazon for a core i5 ultrabook is this, at $584.98, as opposed to $1088.99 for the Surface Pro.

So you compare it to a system that is twice as heavy, has less than half the amount of pixels on the screen, a HDD instead of SSD, no active stylus and a slower GPU and are confused as to why this would make it $500 cheaper? That's great if you don't care about those things or don't need those things but come on don't be obtuse, it's pretty obvious that these features have a significant price premium. You can get a Chromebook for half the price of that Asus you linked too and you would have to make similar sacrifices in specs and features for that too, but again you can hardly say the Asus is bad value just because you can do without the elements that make it more expensive than the Chromebook.

So they're going to build a ARM-based desktop computer. Sort of like a netbook in worse packaging. Why?

If you want a basic 9 inch ARM tablet, buy one. They're really cheap. You can get one on Amazon for about $72. Dump Android and load up Linux if you like.