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That's true, and a very good point. I don't work with HIPAA-covered data, but could they use something like amazon's government cloud?

OBDII see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics#OBD-II also http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=OBDII It has been done and is amazingly useful

Technically while I don't think one should have to rely on a phone for this (see my comment on this thread), such adapters already exist. Virtually all modern cars have an ODB II port for which you can buy a bluetooth device that'll transmit to a phone app (the one that I use is called Torque).

They're literally less than $15:
http://www.amazon.com/Newest-Bluetooth-Diagnostic-Scanner-Adapter/dp/B009F4JHHO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381342473&sr=8-1&keywords=bluetooth+auto+diagnostic

Most people just don't seem to care that much to check, but I was able to use mine to effectively diagnose a misfiring issue I had with my car as a bad spark plug. Saved a lot of money versus taking it to a mechanic.

A lot tougher to get right than software. In software you can implement anything you want, as badly as you want. It doesn't cost anything and it's easy to start over.

readmefirst.txt

Amazon should sell cars.

Ask and ye shall receive!

First, read this:

Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-4A Boxed Set
http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Programming-Volumes-1-4A-Boxed/dp/0321751043

Then read this:
https://www.sans.org/top25-software-errors/

Everything else is a niche.

Here I liked Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship better than Pragmatic Programmer. I guess it just seemed a little more modern to me, though in general the knowledge of both was timeless.

I may have to go back and read Code Complete, it was thick and seemed to cover topics I had already read or been reading about in other other books, so I passed it over.

Exactly. Code Complete is a great book. I liked The Pragmatic Programmer -- from Journeyman to Master even better. It's slightly more meta, but the tips inside are really universa.

Some are even applicable beyond software engineering, e.g. "don't repeat yourself" (i.e. don't have two versions of the same information (e.g. your source in your repository and its documentation on your website) stored in two different places because the probability that over the time both will diverge equals 1. It's better to make one the master copy and derive the other from it.) I recommend this book to all my students.

5. Finally, are the police really that corrupt and/or stupid? Go back up to Professor Duane's hypothetical in which a suspect protests his innocence, and Duane imagines that Officer Bruch -- Professor Duane's real-life co-presenter in this talk! -- takes five words out of context and testifies in court, "He confessed to me, 'I never liked the guy'."

The phrase "Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law." would not exists if this were not the case.

When the real Officer Bruch gave his 'rebuttal', he started out by started out by saying, "Everything he just said was true. And it was right, and it was correct." If I had been in the room at the time, I would have asked him, "Seriously? Were you listening when Professor Duane said that if a suspect protested his innocence in the way that he described, you would take that out-of-context quote and only tell the jury that he said 'I never liked the guy?'" Well, we already know that George Bruch didn't really agree with everything that Professor Duane said, since Bruch contradicted him on some points, such as Duane's claim that "talking to the police cannot possibly help you even if you're innocent". But I would have liked for Officer Bruch to say if he thinks the police are anywhere as stupid and corrupt as Professor Duane was implying that they are.

My favorite example is Verbal Judo , which is about how to lie (while conving yourself that you are not lying) in order to manipulate people. It was published by a former police officer, and is used in training courses for police departments around the country. Ostensibly the reason is for defusing domestic violence through words.

More to the point -- and I went into this in my first article about the Fifth Amendment -- if the police and the courts are even remotely that corrupt and incompetent, then that's a wide-ranging problem that applies to all types of evidence gathered in the case, not just statements from suspect. And if that's the case, then the Fifth Amendment is just a band-aid that only solves the stupid-cops-and-courts problem as it applies to suspect statements specifically. It doesn't solve the problem as it applies to circumstantial evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, false memories, evaluating the credibility of other witnesses, and other factors.

Absolutely

In other words, if you're arrested, suppose the cops really are so dumb and/or evil that they would quote your "I never liked the guy" out of context to try and get you convicted. So, taking Professor Duane's advice, you say nothing. Do you still trust those same police officers to handle the other aspects of your case fairly? To make sure any exculpatory evidence is brought to light? To interrogate other witnesses without leading them towards a pre-set conclusion?

No, that's why there's also a right to legal representation.

As I said in my first article, that doesn't mean that this is not a valid argument for the Fifth Amendment. But it means that if this is the primary argument in favor of the Fifth Amendment, then what the people making this argument are really saying, is that the whole system is broken.

The system was broken before the constitution was created, and the Bill of Rights serves as a patch over the corruptions of the legacy system.

There is apparently a notable body of scholarly work that argues presidential democracies are uniquely unstable compared to parliamentary ones: http://www.amazon.com/The-Failure-Presidential-Democracy-Perspectives/dp/0801846404

Westminster-style parliamentary democracy has stood the test of time pretty well, and been implemented successfully all over the world. American-style presidential democracy has barely worked in the US and never worked well anywhere else.

This is deeply unfortunate, as it means the issuer of the world's reserve currency is likely to become increasingly unstable and ungovernable in the coming decades. If the Democrats hold the line in the current crisis, and the Tea Party are sent packing in the next round of Republican primaries, there may be some breathing room, though, and I have a certain level of trust in the "genius of the people" in the United States to, as Churchill said, "do the right thing after they have exhausted all other alternatives."

This one.

A smart watch that connects to your smart phone? What a great idea.

How strange that no one ever thought of it before.

You don't need a smartphone plan to have Wi-Fi on your phone.

But I'd still have to buy a $200 phone to be used only for scanning checks while I have a perfectly working HP scanner at home. I wouldn't even be able to use it as my regular cell phone because the CDMA2000 carriers won't activate a voice-only plan on a smartphone, and AT&T is notorious for cramming a data plan onto a voice-only SIM inserted into a smartphone.

I have an android phone and an android tablet. I've not seen anything that worked on only one.

I'm on Comcast at home, and the Google Play Store page for the Bing app says the following:

Asus Nexus 7
This item is not available on your carrier.

Bing shows as unavailable on the Amazon Appstore page as well.

The important thing to note is that they also gave us tools such that we would not have to throw off our government in order to fix it. We actually can fire congress. We actually can hold accountable the traitors to the constitution they swore to uphold. They keep this shit up, and more folks will come around to the idea of using them. They may have an armor division, but note that it's actually on our side. The pen is mightier than the sword, and the Army is not the NSA or CIA or individual sessions of congress.

Given your quote (I've bolded the particular sentence), I would strongly urge you read a book called Beyond Outrage by Robert B. Reich.

The problem is not with the US Congress. The problem is not swords vs. pens, the problem is something more nefarious that impacts every single aspect of American existence (at nearly all levels of government and all levels of American life), while operating within the legal boundaries that were set forth by our forefathers in addition to all the subsequent rules/laws that have been appended or tacked on over the past 200 years.

Read the book and be enlightened, become depressed, and at the end, learn about some approaches/methodologies that can hopefully rectify the situation. Hint: they do not involve "firing Congress".

You can pay real money to get The War Machines on DVD.

Read "Machine Beauty" by Gelernter for why easthesics matters in technology.

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Beauty-Elegance-Technology-Masterminds/dp/046504316X

I'm pretty sure windows can do it for you. I know it can at least do automated caching via USB sticks (for what that's worth). You can also buy external cards for pretty cheap that will make a hybrid automatically: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009LIPHNC

Personally, I've got a 128GB SSD which only really fills when I get lazy about deleting games from my steam library.

you seem to have confused ethics with legality and the status quo.

"everyone is doing it!" does not suddenly make something ethical.

- overpricing all their stuff

Well then their sales will suffer, right? Oh... wait...

selling well != ethical

- suing everyone making compatible hardware into bankruptcy

What is "compatible hardware" in this case? Are you talking about the 1990s clones?

no. try google.

- putting in a clause into OSX's license prohibiting using it on anything but official Apple hardware

This is a moot point now, as there is no distribution of the OS other than the Apple store. It's been an "upgrade" market for the OS rather than a "purchase" market for a long time.

incorrect. you can buy the full thing without needing a previous version to install it. check out this listing on amazon if you dont believe me.

Or one of these...
http://www.amazon.com/Executioner-Swat-Mosquito-Swatter-Zapper/dp/B000MU2MJA/ref=pd_sim_lg_7

Ever try to copy and paste text from the web based Kindle reader? No new DRM extensions needed. I couldn't copy and paste. Even inspecting elements I couldn't find the text. I didn't try disassembling the JavaScript.

All I wanted to do was copy a list from a self help book I purchased into something could actually use the list on. :-(

If ites really about power everywhere, use a hand generator. In Japan i bought one for 3000Yen, with radio, pocket light, a charging port, and a buzzer (in case you are somewhere in the rubble after the earthquake its much easier to turn on the buzzer than to shouth all the time). Dont remeber if it charged USB back then, but had connector for all usual phones in Japan.

http://www.amazon.com/CUTEBEAT-TY-JR11-waterproof-charging-TOSHIBA/dp/B005FB4CG2/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Otherwise if you insist in using heat:

a) small temperature difference (thats why they need the water) -> small efficiency. If you have no effective way of cooling the required temperature rises, thus making it less a reuse of unused heat but more a normal generator

b) if its a normal generator, then an open flame is the least efficient way of using the heat. Internal flames are much better

Although you're posting as AC, you make a decent point to which I would like to see a riposte.

Have you ever climbed Denali or Everest or Chimborazo? I can bet that the folks who do today will love having longer-term charging power.

The folks who do it today have things like this: http://www.amazon.com/Innovative-Digital-Hand-Crank-Emergency-Charger/dp/B0089QB2KY/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_0_2

They're more reliable than fire in a strong wind (strong winds occasionally happen on Everest, and I should know, I've climbed it 16 times).

The camp stoves are cool: A buddy of mine has one. Probably is a useful thing for camping, but I don't think I'd care to have one around the house or office.

My own emergency charging rig is simpler, in that it does not require fire: A small, cheap solar panel, and a cheap OEM microusb car charger that is happy with up to 24V.

For night-time use, I also keep an inexpensive jump-start pack charged and ready. It can keep phones charging for a long, long time, or can run small power tools from an inverter in a pinch. I have a 12V CFL light with a long cord that I keep in the car for emergencies, and it will keep that thing going strong for hours.

I can also recharge its SLA battery from the solar panel.

We were without power for a week in June 2012, as was much of the region. It was an interesting time finding/wrangling fuel, dealing with a heat wave, trying to minimize use of a generator, and trying to keep the food (and the beer) cold....but charging phones, day or night, was never a problem with the above kit.

More recently, I've picked up an inexpensive USB backup battery. It's a cute little gizmo, and there are many others like it. This one is special because it has a solar panel of its own (which is nearly-worthless except to prevent self-discharge), and has an adjustable voltage output: I can set it to 12V and power a home router-box or a switch or some other small thing.

And each part of the kit is also useful by itself, for other things (the USB battery lives in the car, and it's been very useful to save a dying Droid more than once: I can charge my Droid 4 from near-flat to full at least twice from it).

A camp stove with a 5V USB socket really only seems useful for camping, since fire is required. And without tallying it all up, I'm inclined to say that my kit (solar panel, one big battery, one small battery, and an adapter) is cheaper and more versatile.

Peltiers are terribly inefficient in the best case. The only one I've seen that makes sense is a wood-stove heat circulating fan, since the fan does double-duty.

If you want to recharge your batteries or phone off-grid, you really can't do better than solar. Here's a $20 charger that'll charge batteries from and to USB, or from solar. Only thing it's missing is a tiny white LED for backup flashlight use:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042Z14FO/

Or you can go a little cheaper if you don't want the USB functionality, and prefer more flexibility:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098SWJUE/

Both will give 4 AA batteries an 80% charge in a day of sunlight, which is enough to charge your phone from zero. If you need faster charging than that, you'll need to spend a bit more. Something like this 7 watt panel should suffice:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CJJ4OUW/

Peltiers are terribly inefficient in the best case. The only one I've seen that makes sense is a wood-stove heat circulating fan, since the fan does double-duty.

If you want to recharge your batteries or phone off-grid, you really can't do better than solar. Here's a $20 charger that'll charge batteries from and to USB, or from solar. Only thing it's missing is a tiny white LED for backup flashlight use:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042Z14FO/

Or you can go a little cheaper if you don't want the USB functionality, and prefer more flexibility:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098SWJUE/

Both will give 4 AA batteries an 80% charge in a day of sunlight, which is enough to charge your phone from zero. If you need faster charging than that, you'll need to spend a bit more. Something like this 7 watt panel should suffice:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CJJ4OUW/

Peltiers are terribly inefficient in the best case. The only one I've seen that makes sense is a wood-stove heat circulating fan, since the fan does double-duty.

If you want to recharge your batteries or phone off-grid, you really can't do better than solar. Here's a $20 charger that'll charge batteries from and to USB, or from solar. Only thing it's missing is a tiny white LED for backup flashlight use:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042Z14FO/

Or you can go a little cheaper if you don't want the USB functionality, and prefer more flexibility:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098SWJUE/

Both will give 4 AA batteries an 80% charge in a day of sunlight, which is enough to charge your phone from zero. If you need faster charging than that, you'll need to spend a bit more. Something like this 7 watt panel should suffice:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CJJ4OUW/

Not a shill, but the following is a great read. http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/0973864907/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1380580238&sr=8-2&keywords=on+the+edge+commodore

Well... my 8 year olds got cheap BLU GSM phones to carry around with them. Amazon has them for about $25, just above the free shipping threshold. Buy a pile, because kids will frequently break/lose them at any age.
http://www.amazon.com/BLU-T190i-Quad-Band-Battery-Bluetooth/dp/B00AA6WVBA/

First I made them carry around a toy phone with them for a month before they could not lose it. Currently both the 8 and the 11 year old break their phones (dropping them or getting them wet or mishandling them) once every few months. Fortunately at this point we haven't lost any SIM cards yet, since those are a bit more meddlesome to replace. Some of our friends had given their kids old smartphones. Those are all broken now too.

We have one of the family plans with T-mobile, so it was an extra $5/mo. per line on our bill, but they had some promotion where it was free for the first year or so.

If you really want to do Skype or Google Messenger or something, get an old laptop or tablet with a docking station that can live somewhere in the house and be always on. Built-in front-facing camera, so it's dead simple, set up the accounts and let it auto-answer so you can just pop in and say hi, if they're comfortable with that. Set this up in a little VTC telepresence area. Don't let them move it around or do anything else with it... if it's not able to stay on and fully powered and signed in, you won't be able to call it and it'll be useless for its intended purpose. Get them a separate device for "playing games" or "educational software".

If you go with a tablet, splurge for the docking station. I've never had a micro-usb cable stay connected and charged worth a shit, particularly when handled by children, but even in the gentle hands of responsible adults.

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Lovers-Guide-Internet-Revised/dp/0449002276
Interesting...still available, and 5 Star reviews.

http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-77816-Toddlerz-Chatter-Telephone/dp/B00000IZOR/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1380552645&sr=8-2&keywords=play+phone+for+4+year+old

I had a thick paperback book called "The Internet Yellow Pages" which was sort of like a print version of the original version of Yahoo! (back before Yahoo was around I think). It categorized websites by subject in a handy desk reference format hehe.

Here's the 1995 version on Amazon: New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages

Fisher Price. The classics endure.

Reminds me a lot of the Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies work that Hofstadter led back in the day.

I don't see this directly working for translation into non-lexographically swappable languages (eg, English -> Japanese) very well, because even if you have the idea space mapped out, you'd still have to build up the proper grammar, and you'll need rules for that.

That being said.... Holy cow, you have the idea space mapped out! That's a big chunk of Natural Language Processing and an important step in AI development. ... Understanding a sentence emergently in terms of fuzzy concepts that are an internal and internally created symbol of what's "going on", not just using a dictionary and CYC-like rules to figure it out, seems like a useful building block, but maybe I'm wrong.

Very cool stuff. Makes me want to go back and finish that CS degree after all.

For your emergency survival kit, take a good long look at all the options for camping gear. If you aren't prepared for a month of camping, alone, way out in the wilderness, with just your emergency kit, you aren't prepared for a fire/flood/hurricane/earthquake. You'd be amazed at the dozens of small things you will need (or seriously want) but would never think of until you try a few days of camping.

* Hiking water filter or lots of purification tablets (1 gallon per person, per day)

* Multi-gallon water containers, and camp shower

* Tent or large tarp

* Air mattress & pump, or foam pad

* Heavy blankets or sleeping bag

* Heavy waterproof jacket, several changes of clothes, perhaps shoes, etc.

* Plenty of dehydrated food, and salt

* Lighter/matches, propane canisters and 1-burner stove, plus cooking pot/pan and utensils

* Prescription drugs, or just aspirin, antacids, etc.

* First aid kit with numerous bandages, antiseptic (iodine/alcohol), burn ointment, and sewing kit.

* Large knife/hatchet/saw

* Shovel, toilet paper, and soap.

* Toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant

* Solar AA/AAA battery and cell phone charger combo

* Spare LED flashlight

* AM/FM/shortwave radio, and perhaps CB/FRS/GMRS/Ham radios

* Compass and a map

* Probably a few others that slipped my mind.

And be sure most of the above is in fully submersible, water-tight containers, like freezer bags or food storage bins.

I'd be worried about triggering the touchpad while my hand is traveling to a button. WHy not put the buttons to the side?

There was a third-party Xbox controller called the FPS Master that moved the face buttons to the grips of the controller to be manipulated by your middle and ring fingers. I wish we had seen something like it in the 360/PS3 generation but third-party controller support was largely shut down by the console manufacturers.

... the controller design is awful. Why the fuck would you re-arrange the traditional diamond? If anything it looks to me valve expects games to get even more dumbed down to two button Wii remote kind of gaming.

I still think the snes classic/Wii classic/playstation controllers are the best in the industry. I love my dual shock and Wii classic controllers.

http://www.amazon.com/Wii-Classic-Controller-nintendo/dp/B000IN0BSU/

Yep, during hurricane Sandy my 13W solar panel was still putting out enough power to keep my pair of 3W light a life lamps going. They might "only" be equivalent to a 45W bulb but when the powers out and the house is mostly dark that's a lot.

All the machines at work are owned by the organization.

You can stop right there. If the organization owns the machine, you have no expectation of privacy, legally or otherwise.

I work in a place that has a stated "no expectation of privacy" policy, but that doesn't mean that if someone uses their work PC to purchase the infamous 55 gallon drum of lube that information is going to be posted on the break room bulletin board.

What it actually means is that if you do something illegal using their computers, then they will turn that evidence over to the authorities, or if you send "trade secrets" to somebody via e-mail, they might discover it. It also means they might monitor your usage to see if you are goofing off too much, so I'm cutting this post short. ;->

But, seriously, a company that does proxying/packet inspection/monitoring is actually in a much tougher legal situation than one that doesn't, because any information that is legally declared as "private" (like medical records) has to be kept private by the company doing the snooping, regardless of the "no expectation of privacy" statement. It's no different from the HR department seeing info about your insurance claims and not being allowed to talk about them to anyone who isn't authorized to see that info.

Do you have a link that describes that?

Of coruse, here you are

I'm not finding anything Googling for combinations of Tex, pipeline, and parsing.

That's because Knuth uses some idiosyncratic terminology. Remember, it was the 1970's anyway. A lot of things was called something else back then and would be unrecognizable by name to your average young whippersnapper. (Going back to CPUs and the issues of ordering and dependencies in HW, what we call "our-of-order execution" was called "dynamic instruction scheduling" in the 1960's. Who'd divine it from the name nowadays?)

Everyone's different. Some go longer some shorter. There's been a few deep studies on this but I think the most accessible description I've found is in the book Sync by Steven Strogatz

Gateway NE72206u 17.3" Laptop

I ordered it yesterday for $450. Thanks for making me look it up again; today it's selling for $370. Story of my life.

Anyway, it's a 2GHz quad core (A6) with 6GB DDR3 and Radeon 8400 GPU. Googling around suggested that it would run a bit hotter than the embedded kits I was looking at, but it should still work.

I was also thinking about waiting for the xi3 Z3RO PRO, but it doesn't ship until November (I'll believe it when I see it) and it's a whopping $550. I figured, why wait when I can have a comparable system (with more RAM!) for $100 less, today. Or, well, yesterday. Today it would be $180 less.

Granted, a laptop is bigger than one of these little cube computers, and has fans. But it's replacing a gigantic HP desktop that sounds like a tornado, so at this point anything would be an improvement.

I our town, most of the GPS devices route people on a road that hasn't existed for 100 years. The Town Road Crew is frequently pulling people with Mass. plates out of the sand pit where the road used to be. At least with smartphones updates are automatic - with older standalone devices it's subject them buying updates and hooking it up to USB which is even more unlikely.

c.f. Jaynes's discussion of Voices of Authority in The Origin of Consciousness.

The new Paperwhite starts shipping on September 30th.

Says it right there on Amazon.com.

In other words, you praise the man who promised to do something you find unethical, and then betrayed the trust of those he made the promise to (and suffered consequences) over the man who decided he will not do something unethical, and suffered consequences for that refusal? You view the regime that punishes those who betray trust given, under consent, as worse than the one that punishes those who exercise their free will to openly refuse the trust to begin with?

I do not see the logic (never mind agreeing with the premise) of your argument.

For the record, the rest of your argument suffers from ignorance. Everybody knew Israel had them from before. If you want to educate yourself about the program, as well as when it was actually used (without a single nuke exploding), I recommend "The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy". It has plenty for you to get mad at Israel over, should that be your inclination, and it even covers the Vaanunu episode.

Shachar

As a consumer I could care less about a device that has a kickstand

Maybe you couldn't care less but others see it as valuable. In the educational setting I'm in, almost 100% of students using their iPads in classes have some type of kickstand and keyboard attachment during class. Take a look at the most popular tablet cases... almost all have some sort of kickstand functionality or kickstand + keyboard functionality.

Same is with the iTunes store in many territories. Guess you'll have to buy the box set, a steal at $210

The last round, those keyboards were peeling within days, if not hours.

Some yes... and when an owner found themselves in that state (such as my wife did), a quick exchange from a Microsoft store solved the problem

I do believe a nice solid BT keyboard made to go with an iPad cover (as integrated as Surface) makes for a much better user experience.

Oh? Which one? A quick search on amazon for "ipad Bluetooth keyboard" turns up 15,645 results for me.

Which of those is the 'nice solid BT keyboard made to go with an iPad cover'?

You've got to admit... Apple's 'Smart Cover' is a pretty good cover, and of a better polish & functionality than most of the other third party covers out there as Apple had the advantage to think & design it ahead of time (and probably having some influence on that generation's iPad design as well)... so to the same I think can be said for the Surface & the Touch and Type Covers.

RIM (and Nokia) made the biggest mistake possible by ignoring the iPhone and what it represented to the entire mobile industry. Their complacency killed the company. They changed far too little, faaaaaar too late.

It's hubris. In their book The Innovator's Solution, the authors describe the problem with Blackberry and outline the iPhone strategy as the way to solve it. It's literally the textbook example and they ignored it.

But I think Steve Jobs read it - "great artists steal".

Somehow I don't think that's going to do much to help the value of Windows 98 Annoyances.

Keep anything, no matter how old, from O'Reilly books.

Sure. You never know when you'll need to reach for Securing Windows NT/2000 Servers for the Internet