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Ok they just look like AA batteries, and provide 2400 mAH each, which is isn't even impressive compared to a good AA battery. But saying there's no use for being able to charge 4 iPads doesn't begin to cover how the original suggestion of using a device that provides 4800 or 9600 mAH at 1 amp is off target. Neither will charge ONE ipad at full speed or to 100%. This device can charge an ipad, iPhone and iPod without breaking a sweat, or at least it would have.

If you wanted to find something cheaper, you can, but not for $20, especially if you actually want to charge an ipad, and do it at regular charging speed.

So look, if you can't find the value in something like this, that's great, but it doesn't mean $20 and 4800mah works in all situations.

Ok they just look like AA batteries, and provide 2400 mAH each, which is isn't even impressive compared to a good AA battery. But saying there's no use for being able to charge 4 iPads doesn't begin to cover how the original suggestion of using a device that provides 4800 or 9600 mAH at 1 amp is off target. Neither will charge ONE ipad at full speed or to 100%. This device can charge an ipad, iPhone and iPod without breaking a sweat, or at least it would have.

If you wanted to find something cheaper, you can, but not for $20, especially if you actually want to charge an ipad, and do it at regular charging speed.

So look, if you can't find the value in something like this, that's great, but it doesn't mean $20 and 4800mah works in all situations.

Actually I think you are still wrong, the device they were promising to build had a 25,000 mAh battery. It could charge your phone ten times on one charge. You CANNOT find one that large for that price on Amazon.

But by no means should you read the article or actually look anything up before you insist that your two cents is right in multiple posts.

I went and checked, the closest thing I could find only had a 16,000 mAh battery, and it was $100.
http://www.amazon.com/dreamGEAR-iSound-ISOUND-4591-Back-Up-Flashlight/dp/B0063GM6O8

So for half the announced retail price of a POP, you can a device with two thirds the capacity.

Ever tried to charge an iPad 3 with one of those $20 devices? It takes a long time because only official Apple chargers are allowed to provide 2A. A standard USB charger can't even prevent the battery level from falling when the device is in use, let alone boost it.

There are many chargers providing 2 amps out.

Actually I think you are still wrong, the device they were promising to build had a 25,000 mAh battery. It could charge your phone ten times on one charge. You CANNOT find one that large for that price on Amazon.

But by no means should you read the article or actually look anything up before you insist that your two cents is right in multiple posts.

I went and checked, the closest thing I could find only had a 16,000 mAh battery, and it was $100.
http://www.amazon.com/dreamGEAR-iSound-ISOUND-4591-Back-Up-Flashlight/dp/B0063GM6O8

What about the high-capacity battery? Did you figure that into your 6 dollars?

http://www.amazon.com/capacity-portable-External-Motorola-Blackberry/dp/B008S4QR2U/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1356098608&sr=8-13&keywords=high+capacity+battery

Add about $15 for the battery.

The expertise in these people is not investing in small businesses, it is risk management.

No, risk management is too broad a term for what they do. If you put a VC or banker in insurance or a casino, they aren't automatically going to do well because of their past risk management experience. They'll have some advantage due to their past experiences, but they'll still need to learn the ropes to avoid major risks. Same goes with space projects. There's a lot to learn.

And angel investors generally aren't specialists in any sort of risk management.

The people who are providing the funding in the case under consideration also have zero experience in spacecraft. Additionally, they are not specialists in risk management.

And who would those people be? A big group is NASA which has the experience. On the private side we have a number of founders who might not have started with all that much experience (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and John Carmack), but they definitely have it now.

Come to think of it, nobody is born with that experience. So you can point to any investor and claim that at some point they didn't have the experience.

So once again, why should bankers, VCs, etc who already operate in successful areas gamble on a sector that they know nothing about? Why should that be a big deal? Wouldn't you say that a key goal of risk management is to understand your risks as best you can?

We'd see what we do see whether or not space activities have near future profit potential. Investors who have considerable knowledge of a risky field are the ones who end up investing in that risky field.

Here is a good book on the topic.

Sounds interesting, but irrelevant to our discussion. One doesn't need a history lesson to see that risk management is not a broadly interchangeable field that operates independent of a considerable specialized body of knowledge.

A point that would be valid, if any of these parties had experience with both launching space ships and starting small businesses and hence, an avenue for making such a comparison.

The expertise in these people is not investing in small businesses, it is risk management. That's what they study, their passion, the value they add. Their specialty is looking at potential investments of capital and making the best possible calculation of whether it will produce a return that justifies the risk. Their kind has a long and storied history of investing in highly unknown fields, including sending ships into the unkown to seek riches. Here is a good book on the topic.

But alas, these are all entities that tend to have a lot of experience in funding small businesses and not very much experience in spacecraft.

The people who are providing the funding in the case under consideration also have zero experience in spacecraft. Additionally, they are not specialists in risk management.

IQ was for finding children with learning disabilities.

That's all.

The US Army are the ones who took it and turned it into a measuring stick and subsequently the US educational system followed suit.

See The Mismeasure of Man for a concise history.

Stephen Jay Gould is a hack who set the (real) social sciences back a century with his pie in the sky cultural marxism garbage.

The fact that he's held up as some sort of scholar is a sign of just how corrupted the humanities have become.

Here is an excellent refutation of the above linked "work".

The problem is that if there was one type of intelligence certain patterns in solved problems/items would hold and they dont.
You can ofcourse search for subpopulation of items/ppl where you can construct a metric scale but these also do not tend to be robust in replication. This point of view on intelligence is a positivist, empirical one and there are others like the definition of problem difficulty on kolmogorovs complexity. Problem is that reality doesnt give a fuck and we already know that there is no single difficulty/intelligence scale that can explain the observed patterns.
more information here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasch_model
http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Measurement-Polynomial-Representations-Mathematics/dp/0486453146

There are a good series of books for this situation, e.g. English Grammer for Students of German.

It's amazing how little you know of your own language until you try to learn another. Australia seems particularly bad due to our geographical isolation. Kids (myself included) come out of school knowing only noun/verb/adjective/adverb.

IQ was for finding children with learning disabilities.

That's all.

The US Army are the ones who took it and turned it into a measuring stick and subsequently the US educational system followed suit.

See The Mismeasure of Man for a concise history.

that there was no correlate between video game violence and real world violence with kids.

I used myself as a model; I don't care how much Halo or Mass Effect or Fallout (3) I play, I just am not going to go on a shooting spree. Correct. No ****, I win a prize.

The reason that we -- me, and *probably* (ha ha) everyone else here won't either is, because while there may be some measurable desensitization to violence, most of just aren't wired to do go off. We have impulse control.

Teenagers on the other hand, not so much. I finished this this year On Killing.

Intriguing multi-decade study primarily on WWII era to Viet Nam era soldiers' propensity for killing. A later chapter in the book talks about violence, kids, and video games. Up until that time, I thought the connection was bull****. Now I have/am seriously rethinking this.

I think it is disingenuous to think that on one hand, video games are used to train soldiers eg but there is no overlap/carry over with unintentional civilian applications. Is this a simplification? Maybe, but look at the commonalities.

All I am saying is that, yes, it can be a problem, but really it is only the tip of the iceberg -- to focus on this and not the larger issues (as so many have already stated) is maddening.

TL;DR video game violence is a (small) problem, there are larger problems out there.
 

I would mod you up if I could. Russian seems like it has more good information in it.

If anyone cares, I've made a program to help memorize Russian words. It goes along with and contains the vocabulary from this book.

I have studied other languages. I've got a talent for it.......The problem with Chinese is the tones......as an adult unless you want to devote the next decades of your life to constant work at it, you will never learn Chinese characters.

Uh, maybe you don't actually have a talent for it. Tones are just singing, you have to sing the words. You might want to consider singing practice if you are really that bad, you can't handle tones. Otherwise it could be your teacher is really, really bad. If you want to have a native sounding accent, tones are definitely the most important component, but they aren't THAT hard. And the simple grammar means you can learn very quickly.

You are right that Chinese characters are hard. They are the reason Chinese is so difficult, but if it takes decades, you are doing it wrong. Check out the method in this book and you can do it in year (or a couple months if you're extremely dedicated).

As for Russian, it's true the grammar is complex, and your description didn't even include all the special cases/exceptions. Fortunately, you don't actually have to learn all the grammar to communicate. Russians will still understand you when you mistakes all over the place, and they will usually correct you, and tell you when you're wrong. I've never met a Russian who wasn't happy to tell me I was wrong.

This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters.

But then when your SSD fails you have to throw out your hard drive too. It just so happens I'm here because Mushkin just sent me a "prove that you own the drive with the lifetime warranty" mail for the 60GB Chronos drive that was in my server and I'm procrastinating looking up the invoice. ;)

Software handles this well. Windows has it built-in and Linux has several options.

I use flashcache (from Facebook) and ZFS (zfsonlinux project). bcache is also in-progress being integrated into the md stack.

ZFS:

zpool create tank /dev/sda3
  zpool add tank cache /dev/sdb1
  zpool add tank log /dev/sdb2
  zpool attach tank /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2

(read cache and mirrored write cache on mountpoint /tank )

Flashcache:

flashcache_create -p thru home-cached /dev/sdc1 /dev/sda4
  mount /dev/mapper/home-cached /home

It just so happens that I specified my Thinkpad with Centrino wireless so the mSATA bay was available and I put a 120GB drive in there and it's really a beautiful thing. I haven't done the measurements, but flashcache in front of /home should cut down on the power usage, besides being a nice speed boost. For me, $1/GB was the magic number to make it worthwhile. Oh, and hey, if anybody wants to help with the implementation of /etc/cachetab, hop on the list!

This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters.

But then when your SSD fails you have to throw out your hard drive too. It just so happens I'm here because Mushkin just sent me a "prove that you own the drive with the lifetime warranty" mail for the 60GB Chronos drive that was in my server and I'm procrastinating looking up the invoice. ;)

Software handles this well. Windows has it built-in and Linux has several options.

I use flashcache (from Facebook) and ZFS (zfsonlinux project). bcache is also in-progress being integrated into the md stack.

ZFS:

zpool create tank /dev/sda3
  zpool add tank cache /dev/sdb1
  zpool add tank log /dev/sdb2
  zpool attach tank /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2

(read cache and mirrored write cache on mountpoint /tank )

Flashcache:

flashcache_create -p thru home-cached /dev/sdc1 /dev/sda4
  mount /dev/mapper/home-cached /home

It just so happens that I specified my Thinkpad with Centrino wireless so the mSATA bay was available and I put a 120GB drive in there and it's really a beautiful thing. I haven't done the measurements, but flashcache in front of /home should cut down on the power usage, besides being a nice speed boost. For me, $1/GB was the magic number to make it worthwhile. Oh, and hey, if anybody wants to help with the implementation of /etc/cachetab, hop on the list!

VISA and MasterCard aren't normal businesses, they're banks. If you don't understand why banks are special and need to be regulated, I suggest you pick up an economics textbook, I recommend Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw, and read the chapter(s) covering the monetary system, banking and the growth of money and inflation. As for "relevant international organizations" there basically are none, apart from powerful nation states, because the power to regulate commerce has always rested implicitly, and when necessary explicitly, upon the economic and military might of those nations that can enforce their wills upon other potential or competing authorities. It's no accident after all that the value of any currency throughout history has always been closely associated with the economic and military might of the entity issuing it and their ability to standardize and enforce its use.

I'm not sure the branding was always the problem. cf: http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-SD2005-5-port-Gigabit-Switch/dp/B0000C20XG/

I'm not sure where you're getting your information, maybe it's just out of date.

Grid-tie inverters are designed to feed power to the grid.

They automatically phase sync to the grid and automatically shutdown if if the grid shuts down. That's why they're called "grid-tie inverters".

They're available from 250 watts for a basic unit for less than $100 (made in china) up to 6000 watts with battery charger and automatic transfer switch from Outback or Xantrex for between $2000 and $5000.

So I don't know where you're getting your $20,000 to $30,000 figures.

This is more interesting than that. Retallack is a well-respected expert in the area of paleosols (ancient soils) and wrote what is probably the definitive book on the subject. He's also an expert in many aspects of terrestrial trace fossils and paleobotany. Few people would dispute his contributions in those areas. So he's a well-respected guy, and if anybody is going to recognize a cryptic terrestrial environment, he would. As the article mentions, when Retallack first put forth his "lichen" hypothesis for the Ediacaran fauna, people certainly gave it proper consideration, and they still do so via this recently published paper. It's published, so people will read it. That doesn't mean most people think much of the idea, and I personally don't buy it at all (not only lichens, but terrestrial for these Ediacaran sites? Uh, not a chance in hell for most of them). But yeah, an unusual and fringe interpretation doesn't preclude publication if you make your scientific case well, even if most people don't ultimately buy it.

Publication sometimes happens with reviewers saying something like "I disagree with the authors' interpretation, but if they address points X and Y, it should still be published." Something controversial does have to rise to a bit higher standard to overcome initial impressions and the usual "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" expectation, but controversy will not by itself preclude publication. Some of the best papers ever were "controversial".

"Machines of Easy Virtue"

My current monitor goes to 1920X1200. (16:10). I had a hard time finding it because the great majority of modern monitors are 16:9. (1920X1080). This one is an older NEC that's color accurate. I think I will use it until it can't be repaired anymore.

I am SOOO jealous!!

I just got a few Dell UltraSharp U2412M for work. Decent 1920x1200 monitors at $360 delivered, even in our ridiculously expensive country. Considering it's something you presumably use a lot, it's not very expensive. There are quite a lot of this type of monitor out there. At home I've got an older and more expensive Asus 1920x1200, but the Dells are very good quality.

You might have been sarcastic, in which case you got me :)

It is the only thing that protects them from the wrath of US army... ever wondered why the US only attack weak countries?

North Korea has plenty of defenses without nuclear weapons.

North Korea has conventional weapons on the Demilitarized Zone that could kill millions of people in Seoul within minutes.

North Korea could also kill many in Japan with conventional weapons.

North Korea also has the support of China, which has seen multiple invasions from the Korean peninsula and would rather keep an ally there, however weird, as a buffer from the U.S. and any other military.

This book treats North Korean strategy: Understanding North Korea: Demystifying the World's Most Misunderstood Country

(Check out the online videos for Probabilistic Graphical Models by Dr. Daphne Koller at Stanford. Alternately, check out her book on the subject. The book is largely unreadable, and the videos are dreadfully obtuse. Her class at Stanford is well known as a weeder.)

I'll have you know that I at least, as a Ph.D. in a related field, have no problem what-so-ever with any of those lectures. They are terse and succinct, describing only the necessary details of probabilistic graphical models to an audience already familiar with both probabilistic models and graph theory.

And it is not really relevant here as we are specifically talking about engagement and grading. It does not matter if students are paying attention to a teacher or box. The key is that student engagement is the issue. Likewise, it does not matter whether grade are added up, or awarded based on tests, or level completed. What matter is that students are graded based on the content and skills they can demonstrate, not how they can manipulate the system to earn points.

This is where the games come it. They can hold the attention of the student. But a game is something that is an adversarial process, where information is held back, and must be unlocked by completed often unrelated tasks. The experience of the student in that a game is often separated from the knowledge and skill is exactly what causes it be difficult to use. For instance, I once used a game that was developed by people who were very smart and very familiar with teaching, learning, children, and assessment. Points were added and levels gained as the student when through the process. Some motivated students did very well. But many students just played the game to win, that is simply figured out what the game rules were, played by those rules, and then exited without significant learning.

Which is why simply saying that counting up, that rewarding the class for success, that being positive and engaging student self esteeem, is not sufficient and has not been sufficient since these things were in wide use 50 years ago, 100 years ago, I mean maybe even 10000 years ago. And what we are talking about is not educating a elite, but educating everyone. And to do that a wide array of methods must be used, not just the favorite or the one currently in fashion.

Compare a course where you would retain 30% of the content with a course where you would retain 70% of the same content: which would you choose?

Everyone whining about "pandering to the unmotivated" is missing the point: the current class/lecture model started over a thousand years ago and is not optimized for learning. In this century we now know much more about the neurological underpinnings of how people learn, so it makes sense that we should try to optimize the process.

College (or an online course, or work-related training) should be as effective as possible. Some lecturers have this figured out, but most don't.

Stanford is considered a hard school not because the material is difficult, but because it's presented in a way that's hard to learn. Only the brightest and most motivated students can thrive in that situation, which helps to build the "best and brightest" reputation. The reputation comes not from quality of education, but difficulty of education.

(Check out the online videos for Probabilistic Graphical Models by Dr. Daphne Koller at Stanford. Alternately, check out her book on the subject. The book is largely unreadable, and the videos are dreadfully obtuse. Her class at Stanford is well known as a weeder.)

One great aspect of the ongoing MOOC revolution is that everyone is competing on an open field. Instructors using more effective techniques will be perceived as better teachers while the "old-school, cannot change, it's always worked for me" crowd will be left in the dust.

Gamification is a technique for more effective teaching.

Now let's say you order from Amazon because it's $10 cheaper. That money leaves the local community, but $10 stays ... you're $10 wealthier. The local bookstore has terrible selection and is expensive... it goes out of business. Meanwhile you've got a local farmer's market and you shop there with the extra $10 you have. That's wealth creation: you have the same goods (a book) plus more money ($10) to buy other goods (fresh food). If this is the general trend, the Farmer's Market garners that much more business, expands, and replaces the local book shop's place in the community--the community demand for a farmer's market was higher than a local bookstore, the community is now wealthier.

Interesting but oh, so very wrong. And it's wrong because it's a localized and on short term thinking. Its like the joke about drinking alcohol to kill weaker neurons, thus becoming smarter (or the "corporate fat trimming" game)

Let's extend a bit the frame of reference: say all in that community that want books will buy from Amazon and "earn" the $10. The $10 become disposable income and assuming enough of them decide to spend the $10 at Farmer's Market, the price for your vegies will increase - it's only natural to be so, the price is "whatever you are willing to pay" and people with more disposable income will likely be willing to pay more.

And that until the local farmers increase the price high enough to be seen in the place of the "bookstore keeper"... and be shot down because, you know? on Amazon, one is already able to buy Tuscan milk by the gallon at possibly lower prices.
And... oh, gully... with the "earned" money the people in community may do such nice things!!!...
Like: deciding to get a mortgage for a home at super-inflated prices... because they are willing to pay more, they saved a lot, haven't they?... (sounds familiar when you think of US as the "community"?)
The result: a community will less capability of survival (local businesses being shot down) and with not much wealth after all.

Essentially, we got faster, cheaper, and lower power, all at once. Then, we cranked up the speed, put more dollars into cutting-edge technology, and things became faster, hotter, and more expensive. We've gained wealth, though--we've gained it and we've spent it to get even more speed. We had all of speed, power consumption, and cost, and we paid the cost and power consumption gains back in and opted for even more speed. In the end, though, the output's still bigger than our original input.

As for the meaning of "wealth": ever since the currency was floated, the "absolute wealth" is relative: the society no longer values it, but values "wealth increase rate". Doesn't strike you as peculiar that the finance people never judge an economy by the absolute value of the GDP, but only by the "grow rate"?
To put the problem in your term: as big would it be your current output, after so many businesses being shot down (and relocated in China), what are the chances that you'll still be able to stay relevant in the "growing race"? And if you are not able, how long until your "bigger output" will mean exactly nothing?

Now that the number of planets around stars in this galaxy alone is in the ballpark of several billions, one starts to think that the reason for no apparent alien civilizations similar to this one is because they boil themselves out .. they simply raise the temperature of their own place before they are able to either counter the effect, or before they are tech savvy enough to colonize someplace else.

This idea has been around for a few decades now. In Larry Niven's Ringworld , the alien race the Puppeteers had moved their homeworld further away from their sun some centuries before the start of the novel, in order to avoid the death by heat that Niven felt would accompany technological development.

I wonder how of those people feel that way because they believe that the higher cost means it must be the best product they could have purchased.

While you are correct that there is a tendency for some people to rationalize a poor buying decision, and certainly agree about the rampant insanity of many "audiophiles", you would be equally incorrect to assume that is the main reason why Apple has been so wildly successful.

In the end, people have to use these things, and I can assure you that there would have long ago been a mass-exodus away from Apple products if there was something fundamentally wrong with them.

And "cachet" might get you the first Apple sale for a particular customer; but for most of them, it wouldn't go past that, and that's not the typical pattern.

I have used plenty of brands of computer and consumer-electronic equipment in my nearly 40 years' experience with same, and with absolutely zero exceptions, in those areas where Apple competes, their products are consistently head-and-shoulders above the others in terms of build quality, attention to detail, longevity, and overall "user experience".

Apple has the top sellers in the U.S. in the product areas of notebooks and (consumer) desktops, music players, tablets and (relative to any other single brand) smartphones. Do you really think they got there, especially in this weak economy, on cachet?

All the search results open an Amazon webpage with Canonical's Amazon Affiliate Code, which adds a tracking cookie to your session and makes Canonical get back an undisclosed percentage of all your Amazon purchases, as long as that cookie stays there.

Are you asking for Dover books that are reprints of 1970s (and possibly later) texts? I'm a different AC but I believe there are many such books. e.g.: A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem (Dover Books on Physics)

How about just relying on the science to speak for itself?

You can' t actually believe that climatology is easily, readily or immediately accessible to the average person, can you?

And even if you do, what of the concerted effort on the part of politically motivated or professional denialists, sensationalist and ill-informed media and business interests in energy, development, and consumption based industries? They rightly believe that their magnitude of the basis of their wealth would be diminished by any rational response to the realization that human activity is partially responsible for climate change. You should read Naomi Oreskes' book, Merchants of Doubt. Then you should reconsider the naivete of such a question.

We live in the age of consumption. And if our collective impact on the natural systems because of our industrial activity that we we require for our ever increasing population and its wants and needs, then we either accept the need to change our behavior or we place a magnified burden of change on future generations.

So far, head-in-the-sand politics rules the day, and letting science speak for itself, when advertising, propaganda and power politics rule that day, is just another way of maintaining the status quo. It will take a paradigm shift for humanity to address this because our most powerful leaders seem bent on justifying the pursuit of wealth above health and privilege above responsibility. So far, classical economics has won out over rational thought.

Fact 2: Most winners will not know they are going to be winners. Most losers can see they are going to be getting the short end of the stick

Fact 3: The losing side will fight tooth and nail to avert it.

When the side that is going to lose is rich and powerful, they employ very powerful techniques to avoid it or postpone it. They will buy out the competitors, engage in collusion, pay the legislators (legally or illegally), spread misinformation, doubt and feat, anything. It is very instructive to read the book by the University of Chicago professor, Dr Raghuram Rajan, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists

Copyright is one place where we can see the dynamics playing out very clearly and use it as an opportunity to educate the public.

Yep, that's the conclusion I came to as well, for this few-weeks-old laptop I'm typing on at the moment (Fedora 17). Intel video, Intel Wireless, Intel chipset. I'll just copy & paste what I wrote on the Dell/Ubuntu thread (specifically addressing the poor video resolution then, but the rest holds):

Agreed. I just needed to buy a new laptop (1.5 yr old MSI just flat died) and I wound up with a Lenovo e430, with all the Intel options (Centrino Wireless, Intel 3000 graphics, etc. - i.e. working drivers). I got a 14" matte screen, a slot for an SSD (128GB Mushkin), and the lowest-power i5 that can still do AES-NI (for LUKS). I got it for $550 from Antonline via Amazon. It was completely non-fussy about inheriting the 4GB DDR3 DIMM from the previous machine and the BIOS lets me put the ctrl-key back where it belongs. :)

It is not the world's finest laptop, but it's quite nice and a decent developer's machine, especially with root on SSD and flashcache in front of /home. But, more importantly, that's the most I was willing to spend for a low-resolution screen. If they had one of the 1900x1200 screens from, what, 2002?, available, I would have spent more. Seeing as all the phones are going higher density now, I'm hoping that technology trickles up (down?) to laptops in a year or two, so I didn't want to spend my 3-year laptop budget at this time. I've spent $3K on a laptop before, but there's just nothing out there at the moment that's worth it.

To be fair, I have spent a non-trivial amount of time tuning it (e.g. Synaptiks for KDE is in an OpenSUSE repo but not any Fedora repos...yet) and still haven't spent the time to get Intel Rapid Start (wake from SSD without BIOS init ... but LUKS...) working yet. Dell might have already worked that all out - but on the other hand I am contributing my tweaks upstream as I go, and expect others to do so as well.

Also read Classified Woman by Sibel Edmonds.

It's scary how few people in the U.S. take the corruption in their government seriously. There are jokes!

The corruption is FAR, FAR more severe than shown in the Harvard Review article. For example, read Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban.

Or read House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.

To many in the U.S. government, killing other people is a way of making money.

It's scary how few people in the U.S. take the corruption in their government seriously. There are jokes!

The corruption is FAR, FAR more severe than shown in the Harvard Review article. For example, read Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban.

Or read House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.

To many in the U.S. government, killing other people is a way of making money.

>>Corn to ethanol only makes sense if you are trying to build up the ethanol infrastructure in the hopes of more efficient production methods coming down the pike.

True. But corn ethanol overall is a terrible idea. You get severe price shocks you get every time the price of oil goes up. (For a good book on this subject, I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/The-Economics-Food-Feeding-Fueling/dp/0137006101/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top)

>>Already it has displaced chemicals like MTBE, and all cars built since the early 2000s can handle E85, and most service stations seem capable of delivering the now-common 10% ethanol gasoline.

It only displaced MTBE in the sense that MTBE got banned, and so ethanol was the only readily available alternative.

Earlier cars can be damaged by higher levels of ethanol in gas, which is one of the reasons IIRC, why they backed away from a 15% fuel blend mandate. But we do have a legal mandate requiring the 10% blend, so it's no coincidence that gas stations can handle it.

The amount of biofuel mandates to be produced in the US is going to double in the next five years or so, but to avoid price shocks, corn ethanol is going to be capped (at a rather large number). "Advanced biofuels" from other sources is supposed to make up the difference.

More like "Looks like another Windows version has been released. Time to start bitching about how terrible it is." This has occurred with EVERY version of Windows.

http://download.cnet.com/Windows-7-Annoyances/3000-20412_4-75188203.html
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/fixing-five-common-windows-7-annoyances/
http://askbobrankin.com/five_annoying_things_about_windows_7.html
http://techgage.com/article/top_8_vista_annoyances/
http://www.doitscared.com/826/common-windows-xp-annoyances-and-how-to-fix-them/
http://wiki.robotz.com/index.php/Annoyances_of_Windows_2000/XP
http://www.amazon.com/Windows-98-Annoyances-David-Karp/dp/1565924177

You could always get an old school headset and keep it at your desk.

As far as verifying the claims goes, try Glassdoor. Of course, it's still a matter of trust, but it'd have to be a pretty huge conspiracy to skew the results there. In practice, comparing what I've seen there to anecdotal evidence from coworkers and friends in several big companies, it seems to be pretty accurate.

It's hard to say what the best venue is for someone fresh out of college, but beyond that it's mostly networking. I found that LinkedIn helps a lot, too. And, of course, the good old fashioned writing letters to any prospective employers and asking if they have open positions. For big guys (which is where you usually want to be if you want a stable 6-figure salary), they generally have their own public listings online, where you can find something of interest and apply right away:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/jobs
http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/index.html
http://www.google.com/about/jobs/
https://careers.microsoft.com/search.aspx ...

Cost of living in Puget Sound is relatively high, though probably not as high as SF, from what I've heard. I'm paying $1300 in rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Redmond, but it's literally 10 minutes walking distance from my office, so they charge some premium for that. Also don't forget that there's no state income tax in WA, which comes up to a hefty difference at the end of the year.

(By the way, Google also has an office in Kirkland, WA these days, and they seem to be growing it rapidly and are constantly seeking to hire more people.)

If you want more interesting confirmation, take a look at the books written by Christopher Andrew from Vasily Mitrokhin's notes. Mitrokhin was a senior archivist for the KGB during a significant span of the Cold War, and one of his jobs was to destroy old case notes of KGB activities. He was troubled that these significant activities should be lost to history, so he made handwritten copies of many of the intelligence activities the KGB undertook. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he drove his collection of notes over the border and delivered them to the British Consulate.

The absolutely stunning thing about his notes is that they reinforce almost everything the U.S. government had told us was Soviet lies and propaganda. That includes really dirty stuff, like the pernicious rumors that "AIDS was a product of U.S. Army experiments in Fort Dietrich", which he reveals to be the product of an active KGB disinformation campaign that was part of a deliberate plan to embarrass the U.S. government. (That particular rumor was so cruel and useless that the KGB later tried to discredit it, but it still lives on in the minds of conspiracy theorists.)

The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB is one of my favorite books.

It's really cool to read the book and have direct confirmation from the USSR's own records that that the U.S. government and the CIA were not lying to us, and that these lies came straight from a KGB operation. This isn't the CIA whining "we didn't lie, please believe our records," this is direct evidence that the KGB created these lies.

But does the U.S. lie to us? They certainly withhold a metric ton of facts on a daily basis, and undoubtedly there are some specific instances of individuals lying. But I don't think it happens on the vast scale that the conspiracy theorists would have us believe.

If you haven't already read George Orwell's 1984 , you really should do so. The frequent comparisons between contemporary society and the novel aren't just based on a vague feeling of constant surveillance, which you might imagine if you don't have a knowledge of the book itself, but with things like this even Orwell's specific technology is coming true and even being outdone.

In the novel, the protagonist Winston Smith's television watched him just as he was watching it. He had the advantage of an alcove in his home that wasn't within the view of the "telescreen", where he could sit and keep a secret diary. With this news story and the way microphone technology is evolving, I fear that even retiring to a secluded part of the room to write one's forbidden thoughts will have a Clippyesque mascot pop up on the screen to sell you pens and paper.

You might want to add plate tectonics to the mix. There's a nice book covering specifically all these issues.

Anti-vaccination rhetoric is nothing new... in fact at the turn of the 20th century there were huge struggles regarding the smallpox vaccine. It's a fascinating instance of the struggle between liberty and social responsibility and the rights and the responsibilties of the individual with respect to the state.

There's an amazing book about the early-20th-century smallpox vaccination campaigns and the associated anti-vaccination campaign called Pox: An American History.

I can't recommend it enough. Says so much about the United States and how people's opinions have change (and how for some, they haven't!).

Anyway, here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Pox-American-History-Penguin-Life/dp/1594202869

Amazon has a GeForce 210 with 1GB RAM for 29.99. Not exactly high end.

http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-Express-Graphics-01G-P3-1312-LR/dp/B00498305G/ref=sr_1_10?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1354638062&sr=1-10&keywords=geforce+1gb

Putting man on the moon for 3 days is NOT that hard. It was that NASA planned it, and CONgress funded it, allowing them to get it done.

I'm not going to downplay the role of the planning and funding, but I think you don't have the whole picture. I have some suggested reading. This book almost entirely ignores the astronauts themselves and focuses on the scientists, engineers, and administrators who got them there and back,

It's already in The Crystal Spheres a short story by Brin where a starbound asteroid breaks the solar 'barrier'; and a very good but bittersweet comic book "L'autre Monde" by Rodolphe-Magnin which I believe also has an english edition.

Flattened Fauna. It's both hilarious and fascinating. At first I thought it was just a joke, but actually it's pretty insightful. I particularly liked the discussion about the 3D->2D transformation of the critters. Gruesome and technical.