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The book for chocolate nerds: http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperors-Chocolate-Inside-Hershey/dp/0767904575

We're not Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.

I don't think Bill Gates used his family money to start up the company. However Bill Gates was (possibly still is) extremely talented.

If you read Idea Man[1] by Paul Allen, Bill Gates sneaked around WSU's computer lab with Paul Allen, fixing PhD students' code. That's before Bill Gates went to Harvard to study a degree in law. If you think you are as capable as Bill Gates, feel free to drop out.

I happen to think that the law degree might have helped Bill Gates in running his company.

http://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/dp/1591845378

That is exactly what I want. The OEM car stereo needs to have a built in amp with a standard dock for all devices. Even better would be to add a larger screen, but definetly needs a dock that will not throw the phone in the air on a sudden stop.
Unfortunately, if they implement something it will only be for the iphone like so many car companies have done with the adapter.

I bought a product very similar to what you're describing: the Sony DSXS100, whose fold-down faceplate reveals a tray. Inside, you'll find a USB connector with an iPhone adapter. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with the iPhone... but a product like this, updated with bluetooth and perhaps double-DIN with navigation?

I don't actually want my phone in any plug-in dock in the car, though. I want it in something like a cup holder, with the ability to plug in a charger... but I want it to work like bluetooth. The car should be able to automatically connect, even if the phone is still in my pocket. Of course, I also want it to automatically read me any text messages I receive, and respond with "I'll respond later. I am driving right now" or some other canned responses...

Think again.

How about a USB enclosure for PATA drives. Granted $25 seems a lot to pay for an enclosure for a $40 dvd drive, but the real benefit is he gets to use his old drive that he knows works.

>they're great. 1080p, 3d support, great appearance, 65".

They weren't even making them that small anymore.... 73" 82" and 92" are the choices now.

There is another way: a standing table

I second this. I use this arm to mount a 27" monitor from an overhead shelf. I pivot it between a stand-up desk and an adjacent bed. I work about two hours standing up, then pivot the monitor and work another hour lying flat on my back, then repeat. The only time I sit in a chair is for meals and meetings (and I usually combine those).

http://www.modelint.com/download.html

Executable UML The Models are the Code:
  Elevator Case Study
http://www.amazon.com/Executable-UML-A-Case-Study/dp/0970804407

the really nice but still way too expensive 2560x1600 monitors. (Still over $1000.)

If you don't have a business case to justify $1000 for a monitor that you'll probably use for 5+ years, then you don't really need it.

I'm eyeing the Eizo 22" - about $850 and has a bit higher DPI, along with the high resolution. The 2560x1600 screens are in the 30" range - the DPI isn't very good. That's fine for people with vision loss, but two screens at 1900x1200 are going to be better for most uses.

This kind of screen is a marvel of technology and quality. I paid $739 in 1993 for a 17" flat CRT (1024x768), and that was the employee discount at a major retailer on an $899 display, and those were 1993 dollars - worth $1500 or more in 2012 dollars. It's true that poor-quality displays are now being manufactured at very low prices, but the price of 'cheap crap' shouldn't influence ROI calculations on important business tools.

This should meet your needs; just plug in a USB hub!

Decent CPU, memory and hi-res display. Four-to-five hours is good commuting/coffee shop time, so while its a not a perma-road-warrior machine, its not horrible.

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/microsoft-takes-the-wraps-off-surface-pro-tablets-018506.php

Simps^H^H^H^H^HAcer did it!

Already.
  For less than the $699 I bought mine at.

Battery life is insane on it.

Just sayin'. Microsoft isn't "all that" when it comes to new super-peripheral hardware ventures.

I would add the old "Antenna data reference manual" and a somewhat newer book by the same author, Joseph Carr, Practical Antenna Handbook.

I would add the old "Antenna data reference manual" and a somewhat newer book by the same author, Joseph Carr, Practical Antenna Handbook.

I do MMIC design, not antennas, but here's my opinion:

Build a massive parabolic reflector and put your existing antenna at the focal point. The focal point is the spot the reflector is focusing to. If you build it out of something shiny you can find this by pointing at the sun and finding the hot bit, this could be quite hot. Also be aware of wind as you're building a sail.

If you want to get fancy build a cantenna/rectangular horn and use that as the feed instead. (In a compound antenna the feed is the antenna that's doing the waveguide/free space conversion i.e cable in, raditation out)

Roughly, no matter how fancy a design you use, you cannot get out more power than passes through the area of the antenna. Therefore if you want a high gain antenna it has to be big. Reflectors are good as they're frequency independent and focus the radiation into a tight spot where you tap it out with another, smaller antenna.

There's a lot of information on google about these. Try searching for 'parabolic reflector' or 'heliostat' . The ARRL do good books, the microwave one is quite good and there's an antenna one, I haven't read it but its probably good. You can get an older edition if you want to save money.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Arrl-Microwave-Experimenters-Manual/dp/0872593126

http://www.amazon.com/ARRL-Antenna-Book-22nd-Softcover/dp/087259694X

I do MMIC design, not antennas, but here's my opinion:

Build a massive parabolic reflector and put your existing antenna at the focal point. The focal point is the spot the reflector is focusing to. If you build it out of something shiny you can find this by pointing at the sun and finding the hot bit, this could be quite hot. Also be aware of wind as you're building a sail.

If you want to get fancy build a cantenna/rectangular horn and use that as the feed instead. (In a compound antenna the feed is the antenna that's doing the waveguide/free space conversion i.e cable in, raditation out)

Roughly, no matter how fancy a design you use, you cannot get out more power than passes through the area of the antenna. Therefore if you want a high gain antenna it has to be big. Reflectors are good as they're frequency independent and focus the radiation into a tight spot where you tap it out with another, smaller antenna.

There's a lot of information on google about these. Try searching for 'parabolic reflector' or 'heliostat' . The ARRL do good books, the microwave one is quite good and there's an antenna one, I haven't read it but its probably good. You can get an older edition if you want to save money.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Arrl-Microwave-Experimenters-Manual/dp/0872593126

http://www.amazon.com/ARRL-Antenna-Book-22nd-Softcover/dp/087259694X

Since quite a few have suggested a yagi, and LTE uses the old 700mhz TV range... how about a yagi sold for TV?

I use this yagi for my TV. Worth a shot for $40? Others with better radio experience can say if this is a truly viable option.

You'll still need to fashion a connector to your cellular modem.

Coincidentally, I just spent a long time yesterday looking for a small (=pocketable) programmable calculator versatile enough to be used for simple general purpose 'applications', and found the Casio FX-9860g Slim. It would be perfect for me, but unfortunately is sold out about everywhere in the world. :(

I know there are plenty of older retro machines like that on Ebay, but these are from the 80s and I'd like to have something more recent and faster.

Does anyone know a similar device?

I'm also looking for programmable 'electronic organizer' with PC link, but these seem to have died out as well. (Please don't suggest a smartphone, I already have one and these devices just plain suck for almost everything---no battery life, too expensive, not enough keys.)

Oh noooo! This is how the US government lost it.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ark-of-the-Covenant/dp/B0006HCWNU

http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mercury-Winston-Science-Fiction/dp/B000OP9M4Q

Lester Del Rey under a psuedonym and it had not only ice on the dark side of Mercury, but also Frozen Oxygen.

All this talk about difficulties with serial ports in these modern enlightened times... Everyone agrees that the USB devices can be hard to work with (and some hardware just doesn't like them at all).

My suggestion: Just add a real serial port to a modern portable computer.

$20. Works with Linux, Windows, and even MS-DOS (for times when genuinely antique hardware is at the other end of the wire that needs similarly-antique software to configure it).

1366x768 is a good resolution for a 5" phone, and usable for a 7" tablet.

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.

I don't think you're likely to find a single car (that's not "budget cheap car produced at lowest possible price ever") produced today that doesn't have a USB or an analog line-in port. Or bluetooth, for that matter.

I have a 2006 Volvo S40. I don't have these things, which bummed me out when I got an iPhone a couple years after I bought the car - here I have a perfectly good music player, and I couldn't listen to it through my car stereo.

Instead of bitching to Volvo, I bought a $37 device that pairs with my iPhone over bluetooth, and broadcasts the audio signal on a low-power FM frequency which allows me to listen over my car stereo. It gives me hands-free calling and all kinds of music - Pandora, Spotify, my local music, Sirius streaming (for a nominal monthly fee to enable the internet streaming), and even Youtube and Netflix if I wanted to stream video.

Would it be "nice" to have a USB port or an analog line-in to use instead? Sure - the FM transmitter does have areas where it hits interference, so a direct connection to the audio system would be nice. I'd love to be able to dock the phone in the dash, and charge while offering up many of its functions (audio, streaming, gps & turn-by-turn, and other siri-exposed voice commands) through a nice large on-screen display. But holy hell, adding an after-market kit to your car that will integrate your phone has never been easier, and probably is cheaper than it's ever been. Stop whining.

Make use the CD-R you use is a "vinyl" one:

http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Digital-Vinyl-Multicolor-Spindle/dp/B00009WO51/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354204783&sr=8-1&keywords=vinyl+cdr

yep, my parent's just got a car with a bluelink package, and the most basic GPS features are lumped into their most expensive package. That's just insane considering those features can be had for $100 upfront cost or by use of her smartphone considering she's already paying for a data connection.

This is the only screwdriver you need. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0018IYTYQ/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=boxe0b-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B0018IYTYQ&adid=1T1WKNDKHXCX88Z1YN4B&

For the flashlights, if you have a Costco nearby, they have 3 packs for $20 that have Cree head units. They are fantastic little lights and have low, high and strobe (in case you want to mess with somebody). I've bought 2 packs of them.

They are in a flat blister pack about 14"x14" with a big red "200 Lumens" in the upper left. The brand name is TechLite Lumen Master.

Here's the exact package on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Techlite-Master-High-Intensity-Tactical-Flashlight/dp/B0074D6PE6

They cost a little (if you look around you can find a decent one under $75), but I'd highly recommend a Greenlee like this kit:

http://www.amazon.com/Greenlee-701K-G-Professional-Probe-Tracing/dp/B0042VII7A/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1354174642&sr=8-4&keywords=tone+generator

The first time you find yourself needing one it will pay for itself in the labor saved. No matter how anal someone might be with labeling cables, you will always find a need for something like this.

Although not directly political, there is a book that covers the relational aspects of communication. It will help in all relationships, and helps you discuss the values you care deeply about without damaging relationships in the process. Perfect for both the married and unmarried Slashdotters!

Or send your representatives over, if it needs to be handled in person.

Still, was he breaking any UK laws? If not, what the hell is with this international policing bullshit over, what on a global scale, amounts to minor offenses, like this?

On the bright side, it's nice to see the have appropriate means of dealing with the **AA thugs...

Hmm, well, this might just be the product of being so large. I have no first-hand knowledge, admittedly. But I know three people who've interviewed at Google, and all of them said they were asked these sort of brain teaser questions. None of them got the job, so you always have the sour grapes option, right? But they were very specific about the questions, including the ancient 'you've got a 3x3 grid, how can you cross every node in 4 strokes' and the 'how many piano tuners are there in the world?'.

I also see this stuff turning up in my RSS feed. Just Google (TM) for 'google brain teaser' and you'll get a million hits, and books such as http://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Work-Google/dp/031609997X . Now you can argue than any of these questions are problem solving, but the interviewees were not able to Google (TM) for answers in the interview, and wouldn't that be one of your first tools?

I admire your stand, and believe you would not use silly brainteasers, but it's hard to believe that nobody at the company is doing it based on admittedly secondhand reports.

Take an actual academic ethics course at a university instead of a worthless 'professional ethics' course.

Also read the book Ethics for Dummies. I have it, it's pretty nice introduction to the topic.

If humans were easy to program, there would be no crime.

No crime perhaps, but plenty of show-stopping fatal bugs.

Which is pretty much what happened with totalitarian states in the 20th century. Turns out "programming humans" isn't just hard to do, it also introduces whole new classes of errors. Because suddenly the central bureaucracy office has to become a sort of steampunk multi-million-human-level artificial intelligence implemented entirely on sheets of paper and filing cabinets.

Turns out - rather obviously in retrospect, but it came as a surprise to many political theorists at the time - that imitating mass human problem-solving creativity without using any actual humans is a difficult thing to do.

It's just a pity that decades after the failure of Stalinism that we're still trying to do it today, only with "corporate ERP systems written in Java (plus many photocopiers and vice presidents in suits)" as the AI. And the results are just as impressive. See also: financial crash, climate change, peak oil, resource wars.

I'm going to disagree with this assertion about morality:

it would immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work

The first charge is that this would be an immoral risk to take because you might hurt yourself. In my understanding of morality, it is up to each individual to decide for themselves which risks and consequences and injuries to themselves are immoral. For example, I would not go skydiving, but other people choose to do so. They are taking a risk I choose not to take, but I do not think they are immoral for taking the risk, and I do not think an increase in the magnitude of risk alters the morality of the situation, because they are risking themselves. As another example of higher risk, some people choose to try to circumnavigate the globe on solo fights or boat trips. This is a huge risk; some people have perished in the attempt. But the fact that they were risking serious hurt to themselves does not render their decision immoral.

The second charge is that you are risking hurting another person. But again, this is their risk to take. They decide to travel on a road that includes other human drivers knowing that doing so incurs some risk of injury. Taking that risk is not immoral. As an analogous example, wrestlers or boxers choose to fight each other knowing that there is a risk of injury to each other, but doing so is not immoral because the risk is voluntarily accepted by each participant.

Ideally, travelers could choose between a variety of competing travel arrangements, including roads that might choose to exclude human drivers for the safety of travelers, or roads that choose to allow them for those who desire to take that risk. What would be truly immoral would be to forcibly monopolize some or all of the transportation options, so that people do not have the freedom to create differing transportation alternatives that compete with one another. This would limit the choices of travelers such that some might have to take risks they do not want (e.g., roads with both human and automated drivers, because pure-automated roads are not available), or cannot choose to take risks that they find rewarding, such as choosing to drive when automated drivers are available.

Dr. Walter Block has written an entire book on how the American highway system is currently subject to this kind of immoral forced monopolization, currently causing 40,000 needless traffic fatalities per year, and how the elimination of this immorality is entirely practical and beneficial.

I introduce to you the all new add supported Kindle Fire. Yes you too can get $15, that's FIFTEEN DOLLARS off the price of your new Kindle Fire if you agree to receive their "special offers". Thank you Amazon for leading the way. http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Fire-Amazon-tablet/dp/B0083Q04IQ

If you are science-minded and are interested in the history of cancer research and the state of the art, I can't recommend this book highly enough:

http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/dp/1439170916

I'm not a physician or a scientist, but I spent years on a team with both in a cancer research lab, and everything in the book is consistent with the science I have picked up along the way. It's also very readable. I give a copy to everyone I know who has to confront a cancer diagnosis.

Fine, but your best bet for Twinkies is still ebay.

16 pages worth of results on Amazon for Twinkies.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=twinkies

  http://amzn.com/B002Q46EH6

Amazon is where ebay sellers are getting thier supply. You can buy them in cases.

Not worth the paper they're written on

Amazon.com must have incredible infrastructure, as not only do they have an increasing amount of views, especially on Cyber Monday, but they are serving out more data than ever. The amount of Javascript on Amazon these days is insane: every listing has product image galleries, recommendation galleries, recently viewed galleries, etc. Sure, maybe they've calculated that all those dynamic features make for better sales, but as an individual using a netbook, I find it a frustrating experience to shop when browsing is so sluggish.

Nope. A codebook is an entirely different system than a one-time pad. Codebooks are breakable given enough traffic; see Kahn's The Codebreakers for many examples of codebook breaking in history, as well as some insight into how it's done. One-time pads are truly unbreakable if properly implemented (they can be broken if certain serious mistakes are made such as re-using a key, allowing key material to fall into the hands of an adversary, etc.). Code books and OTP can be used together, including informal code-book-like schemes such as using understood nicknames for things. For example, "Charlie" probably wasn't formally recorded in a true codebook during the Vietnam war, yet it would have been a commonly understood code word for enemy troops among US soldiers.

You can discount gibberish and orders for lamb chops if you are quite confident that the message was, for example, English text, and that "lamb chops" was not a code phrase for something like "crates of ammunition". But you still can't distinguish between "FOURTEENTH TANK BRIGADE WILL ATTACK ON NOVEMBER TWELFTH" vs. "EIGTH INFANTRY BRIGADE RETREATING WITH HEAVY CASUALTIES". In any case, code words, code phrases, abbreviations, jargon and spelling errors can all be reasonably expected in legitimate military and espionage communications, so without detailed inside information, you can't even discount a possible decoding like "RABBITS ARE RUNNING DUE TO CRITICAL LAMB CHOP SHORTAGES". For any given message length, it is quite possible to come up with possible decodings of the same length with exactly contradictory meanings. Thus, even in real life, an intercepted OTP message only gives you an opportunity for traffic analysis.

When properly implemented, one-time pad messages are truly unbreakable in the lab and in practice. Successful cryptanalysis of them is only possible when serious mistakes are made, such as using a single key more than once, using a key that can be predicted by some means, etc.

As an aside, Between Silk and Cyanide was an interesting account of one person's involvement in WW2 cryptography related to espionage operations. If we can assume the author's account is accurate, then there was a lot of WW2 espionage activity using ciphers other than OTP, and OTP (in particular, OTP using letters rather than numbers) was a later development in the war, still further delayed by the complications of distributing key material. So, it makes sense to me for cryptologists to have made an attempt at breaking this recovered cryptogram based on the possibility that some system other than OTP was used to encipher it.

Incidentally, five-letter groups of seemingly-random characters is a common form for enciphered text, and is not specific to OTP. It's conventional to break enciphered text into five-letter groups to make it easier to avoid losing one's place when transmitting it by telegraph or teletype. Cipher machines such as my US WW2 M-209B or my Soviet cold-war Fialka even automatically space the ciphertext out into five-letter groups. It takes actual analysis of a ciphertext to determine what system(s) may have been used to create it. For practical purposes, there will often be information called "indicators" embedded in the ciphertext, so that a busy cipher clerk will know which machine to use and which key to load into it to process that message. There are extant examples of such indicator systems that I've seen, such as in WW2 training materials for message center staff. Knowledge of the indicator system(s) in use by a particular adversary can help a cryptographer determine the best approach for a particular intercepted message, such as "assume this message is a Playfair cipher from some low-level guy we don't really care about", "send this one straight to the folks breaking Enigma traffic", or "put this one in the don't-bother-trying box".

The US has proven time and again, that justice is served only to those who own the system.

Authority is no longer derived from the consent of the governed. No one consented to this.

There is no legal basis for the existence of US government. Resistance is inevitable and necessary. You are already in violation of law, without any special effort on that account. It may as well mean something.

VR glasses? Like these?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Virtual+Digital+Video+Glasses&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AVirtual+Digital+Video+Glasses

Play whatever you want, all these are missing is sensors to determine orientation / movement (same sensors inside almost every smart phone).

Because this lets the browser know and it remembers. So when I come along and spoof the MAC address of your gateway, and route the traffic to my own web server. I also need to run HTTPS or you will get a warning.

Additionally I am also going to need a certificate that your system will see as trusted and valid for the name you requested; which fortuitously remains at least a little hard in the typical case.

Without this I could pretty much count on you just typing amazon.com, rather than https://amazon.com/ your browser would most likely do http first and if you are really lucky try https first but still fall back to http when I don't answer on 443. So anyone who could manipulate your DNS or upstream routing could make you a victim of site cloning, or man-in-the-middle pretty easily. With this the hole is at least partly closed, in that if you have been to the site before your browser knows if its not https something is wrong.

In case you don't get the parent post's literary allusion, he's talking about David Brin's Uplift series which starts with the novel Sundiver . It's a science fiction work based on the idea that human intelligence is due to ancient interference by a mysterious alien race. I re-read it recently; enjoyable stuff and much less dated than one would expect.

Nobody has ever used a Solar Oven before?

http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Oven-GLOBAL-SUN-OVEN/dp/B00286KQ1W

Might need 2 days to get it done.

AC/DC have never released a compilation album.

TFA says there were three. Here's one: http://www.amazon.com/Best-AC-DC-Top-Songs/dp/B004ASZXY6/ref=sr_1_22?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1353446380&sr=1-22&keywords=AC%2FDC

were selling 45s

Looks like they released a new one last year.

But we don't really take their protests at face value - most likely album sales have taken a downturn, so it's time to unleash the 'digital' machine.

Free speech and limited government left the Democrat party after the Viet Nam War. Read Camile Paglia or the WSJ's Free Speech Died on Campus.

Conservative talk radio is jammed with talk of the importance of liberty (Example, Mark Levin, who wrote Liberty and Tyranny). Libertarians, too are obviously against intrusive government, for example, Ron Paul's farewell speech.

A lot of people think that Republican's are just a bunch of Christian, gun-toting hicks, and Democrats are the protectors of the little people, but of course the truth is more complicated..

Try this one, at just over half the price of this Intel brick.

You could try googling for "amd fusion nettop", I hear all the cool kids are using google these days. That's how I found the above one, a review in the first page of results. You fail at the internets.

One other thought. I'll all for liberalization and reform of copyright laws, but it seems that the pirated sites for Russian music (to take one country as an example) far outnumber the legit sites. I once tried to buy an obscure Russian electronica classic by Agata Kristi and couldn't find any site which sold it legitimately although I could find dozens which distributed it (some of which charged money, some of which did not).

Several years later, I was overjoyed to realize that the Agata Kristi album made it to Amazon.com . I guess you can draw your own conclusions.....