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I'm not a doomsday scenario advocate, all I'm saying is you are seriously underestimating the disruption this will cause.

You're looking at it from a traditional economist's standpoint, in which investors can simply spend their way out of the hole. Most of the global economy's growth for the last 100 years has been possible due to cheap energy, and without it, you rely on the other resources you pointed out - but they are all small-scale and locally-oriented. Mass production overseas will have to give out to local manufacturing again, which we should be preparing for NOW but aren't.

Our power grid relies mostly on coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric. Of these, only hydro is sustainable because we rely on petroleum power to obtain and refine coal, gas, and uranium. Electric-powered cars and trains are more efficient than the ones we're using now, but there will only be so much electricity to go around. Transferring demand to electricity will outpace the infrastructure we have to generate and deliver it.

There is plenty of money to invest in the technologies to get us through this bind, as you say, but that faces several problems. For one, none of these investors will be lining up to lose money on this stuff. If it's not profitable, it won't get built. Second is the growing debt problem which is leading us toward hyperinflation. Third is the lack of cheap petroleum to actually build these facilities - or do you think we'll have electric backhoes and cranes by 2020?

I recommend reading Jeff Rubin's Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller to understand why the traditional economic arguments are misleading. Also check out Kunstler's The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand, Campbell's The Coming Oil Crisis, and Sharon Astyk's Depeltion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front.

The tactics the Soviets used were more dangerous that all the money and guns the US ever threw at anything.

That is why the Soviets took over the world! Or at least control most of its finances, shove laws friendly to their business interests down the throat of pretty much every nation out there and have forward military bases in over 60% countries on the planet and spend more on offensive weaponry than the rest of the world combined ... oh wait!

The hysterical bullshit US war-mongers spew would be comical if it weren't so blood soaked.

Go watch his videos.

Right after I finish watching the Ahmed Chelabi videos about the great big stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq all set to go off at 5 minutes notice.

You have no idea what you are poo-pooing.

On the contrary, I have pretty good idea, although the verbal feces here are all yours.

It's not about guns and money, it's about dissolving the fabric of a society from the inside over a generation or two before you create a crisis and move in.

Oh so the Soviets invented the doctrine of "Disaster Capitalism". Clever Commie .... err... Capitalist bastards.

The Soviets were invading South Vietnam and South Korea, using the northern counterparts to each to provide the muscle.

Hence the Great Tank Battle of Saigon where thousands of T-72 tanks of the Red Army squared off against the M48s of the US Armored Divisions with the sky above full of Soviet airmen dogfighting with US Air Force, with tactical nukes going off in the background ... uhm ... what?

Number of US Soldiers killed in the Vietnam War: 58,159. Number of Vietnamese killed: 1.3 million. Soviet citizens dead: 16 (that's six and ten since you are having obvious difficulties with numbers) ... who was invading whom, again?

The Soviets were attempting to conquer the world with a poison ideology.

Words of a religious fanatic. Capitalism is also a "poison" ideology that has been used to do countless acts of unspeakable evil.

....And Blah Blah Blah, Bleh Blah Blih .... This Just In: Iraq War Justified Because USA is Always Righteously Right Even When Totally Wrong! Hurrah! We Kick Ass! They Deserved It! ... Go USA! Go USA! USA #1 ... Blah Blah Bleh Blah .... and so on etc, ad nauseum ...

So while I sometimes enjoy taunting raving lunatics such as you, I am not in the mood today. Go play by yourself in that delusional universe you've created for yourself.

Actually, the Korean, Vietnam and all the cold war related skirmishes are related to defense. The soviets were actively engaged in subverting governments and taking them over and we were the great big prize target for them. When you picture the scenario i describe and think to yourself "there is no way the threat the soviets posed to us was that sinister and involved," know that in fact i was that sinister and convoluted and involved. The soviets were truly trying to take over the world in such a manner that if one understood it they would no longer believe in any way that the US had ever made any attempt to do the same.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan are related to defense as well. Iraqi intelligence has been giving aid to Al Qaeda since the early 90's as they have waged a war against us. The Afghanistan Taliban gave them safe haven from which to plan and conduct this war. Is that enough reason to go to war? That's were the debate starts, but to say that there has been no provocation on any level since WWII is naive. Though i can see claiming that since a lot of it has not been direct provocation it doesn't count, but i would disagree on that point.

Since the end of World War II the US has faced some form of constant threat. Whether or not these threats have been severe enough to warrant the actions we have taken is a separate discussion, but the threats have been there. Those parties that have threatened us have always tried to conduct themselves in such a way that they could always claim any retaliation was unwarranted.

All in all, I think we should have given up Global Super Power status when the soviets fell. It's just not worth it anymore, but I think we were needed while they were standing.

We should stop bothering with foreign entanglements, but there are a lot of people who aren't going to like the fact that that would mean no help for Darfur, or Haiti, no more aid like we gave after the tsunami.

Iraq-Al Qaeda stuff: http://www.amazon.com/Connection-Collaboration-Hussein-Endangered-America/dp/0060746734

Soviet stuff: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-RS8LA-5fmrs/g_edward_griffin_interview_of_yuri_bezmenov/
Yuri Bezmenov was one of the guys doing it until he defected. There is also a series of 7 videos where he gives a university lecture and goes into detail on this process. He is wearing a powder blue blazer in that series.

I know people want to believe the US is some big bad boogey man ruining the lives of innocent foreigners, and we have done some really nasty things. But if you look back at all of the nations that have been the big superpower through history, the US really does set the gold standard for benevolence in global politics.

GPS is nothing new in phones, but sadly end-user access to GPS functionality is still being hindered by many phone manufacturers. My current phone ( a G'zOne) has a GPS receiver, but it's only useful for E911 purposes unless I buy an extra subscription for some sort of mapping service. Even then I still couldn't use the phone as a basic GPS receiver due to software limitations.

I have a copy of Future Memory, which posits that events can be pre-experienced (mostly non-volitionally, similar to a 'near death experience').

This does not imply that the future is ordained. By knowing what's going to happen in advance, we have the ability to choose a better outcome.

this better? The fact is, in general the same hardware for a Mac is usually more than 60% more expensive, in this case over 100%. I would do a more direct comparison, but there really isn't a 1:1 comparison for mid-high range desktop hardware. And I, and most others on the PC side of the argument are wanting a mid-high end desktop. Not a mini, or all in one. If Apple had a $1000-1500 desktop solution, I'd probably jump at it.

I'm not a scientist.

Then stop aping the language of science.

My daily bread isn't obtained by chasing after research grants.

Here, you sweepingly and arrogantly dismiss the only discipline that's elevated us above stone knives and bearskins.

You still haven't addressed the objects bartwol and I voiced: that you have no evidence your theories bear any relationship to the real world. You bloviate about knowledge, but fail to realize that all theories are initially suspect. Only by presenting evidence can anyone change the perception of his theory from "dubious" to "interesting" to "probably" to "well-established". You accuse us of wanting something for nothing, but in reality, you are the one who is overreaching: you want the due consideration and attention that a genuine scientific theory receives, but without having to do the things that make it science.

I reject that idea. If you want others to consider your idea, you have to convince them that it's an idea worth considering. Your say-so isn't nearly strong enough to do that, especially not in areas as well-researched as electromagnetic radiation.

Oh, I'm sure you can spew more bombast about how you "inspire people to think in new ways": so do marketing executives. So do propagandists. So what? Thought by itself is worthless. It only becomes valuable when disciplined with scientific rigor, and you have decided that you'd rather have esotericism than that rigor.

You want to talk books? Let's talk books.

Read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (summary)

The U.S., from a national security perspective, does NOT want people to have cheap and easy access to space.

Robert A. Heinlein pointed this out back in the 1950s; any country that gets access to the moon has the capacity to control the earth.

it would only be a matter of time before someone loaded up one of those ships with as much ceramic coated rebar as the thing could carry.

There is an excellent book called Space Wars by Coumatos, Scott and Birnes, it's also available in the dollar stores (which is how I bought a copy) and explains the use of tungsten rods, dropped from space. No expensive or complicated ceramics, just high-melting-point metal rods, which can withstand the heat of falling through the atmosphere, but vaporize on impact, melting anything in their path for quite a distance, and leaving no fingerprints behind (no evidence) to indicate what country dropped it on them.

Oh boy.

I can't count the number of times I've run across this particular piece of rationalization. Probably because, on the surface, it makes an emotional kind of sense.

Yes, non-ionizing radiation doesn't burn anything. But that's not the problem. Nobody is claiming it IS the problem. The only people who are convinced that anybody is claiming this as the problem simply aren't paying attention. Sorry. I don't mean to come down hard on you, but the EM spectrum is useful in electronics because it vibrates, not because it burns things. Cells, when vibrated on the EM spectrum, react. It's that simple. There is a ton of information available to anybody who wants to know what is really going on here.

Basically, it comes down to this:

Cells respond, evidently by their very nature, to coherent electromagnetic signals in the 1 to 500Hz range. They do all kinds of weird things depending on the pulse rate and power and how the Earth's magnetic field interacts with the signal. Cells have been observed to reproduce many times faster or slower than normal when exposed to different radio frequencies. -Or to open up their membrane walls allowing foreign particles to enter which would not normally be able to pass. Very low power signals can do this and a great deal more.

There are a number of observed mechanics, one of which is called, "Cyclotronic Resonance". Here's an example. . .

As I am sure you know, everything has a natural sympathetic frequency. This is understood. Cyclotronic Resonance is a type of resonance which occurs when both a radio frequency and a steady magnetic field are present. For instance, when you produce a 60Hz frequency, (as in wall-socket current), and combine it with a steady magnetic field of 0.2 Gauss, (as supplied by the Earth's magnetic field), the Lithium Ion resonates and becomes excited. It also moves on a spiral vector. The result is that any trace quantities of Lithium which happen to be in the blood stream of an organism will cease to sit still and will instead energize and move, enabling them to penetrate the blood brain barrier with greater frequency than normal. It was noted that rats exposed to these conditions exhibited behavior consistent with a medicinal dose of lithium drug as compared to the control rats. It should be noted that Lithium is the active ingredient in many anti-depressants.

That's just one small example. There are many others. But you're NOT going to read about them in the main stream press. You just won't. I'd explain why but that's a whole other post. (Typically, people who believe in the whole idea that "non-ionizing" means "Safe" also tend to have trouble believing that the media can be anything less than honest. Or that corruption exists. Or that any group might have a vested interest in mass-medicating a population. Just as one example.)

But there is some excellent information out there. -A good book on this is, "Cross Currents" by Robert O. Becker.

Scary?

Of course it is.

Good luck.

-FL

I recommend Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, the theme of which I took to be, how can we presume to understand a truly alien being, when we cannot understand ourselves?

N.B. I am recommending the book, not the movies.

I think it's pretty sad when you have to resort to Sorcery to sell your products. That should be a crime.

Buti it's been reduced to practice: Magic Inc. and Someday's Dreamers, for example.

I think it's pretty sad when you have to resort to Sorcery to sell your products. That should be a crime.

Buti it's been reduced to practice: Magic Inc. and Someday's Dreamers, for example.

I recommend Dreamships by Melissa Scott for a SF book on that subject that feels pretty believable to me, though it's not a Twenty Minutes in the Future kind of book - the AI in question is one designed to guide ships through the other space used for FTL.

The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves

"Known to be a masterpiece of freethought literature, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors has been out of print but sought after for many years. A small part of it was reprinted in The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read in 1994, thereby causing renewed interest. Many people are unaware that before Christianity there were 15 other religions that also had a savior who died for their sins, then arose from the dead. Graves gives all the details inside, plus much more found in common like the immaculate conception of the gods, virgin born gods, magi, shepherds and angels who visit the infant saviors, the birthday of the gods being December 25th, plus an explanation as to how Jesus began to be worshipped as a God..."

http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Sixteen-Crucified-Saviors-Christianity/dp/1585090182

"Another dumb freetard."

Another comment from someone who didn't bother to read the article or understand the issue.

Here's a quote from the Microsoft press release: "Upon completion of the migration, Go Daddy® will have moved all its parked domains from Linux to the Windows platform."

A "parked domain" is one with no real content, but just one small static web page that says something like "coming soon". The implication is that Microsoft Windows servers are fully capable of serving parked domains.

At the time, March 21, 2006, the story was that the Microsoft marketing department got GoDaddy to make the change by offering a lucrative deal. Why would Microsoft do that? This April 7, 2006 story explains: Microsoft Server gains 4.7% market share of hosted domains.

A parked domain, even though it is never visited except by accident, is a "hosted domain". Now it was possible for Microsoft sales people to talk about how Microsoft Windows server software was rapidly gaining market share. That would be entirely misleading, however.

Note that the press release misspelled GoDaddy as "Go Daddy", even though it was spelled correctly a few words earlier. That gives a picture of the level of competence involved at Microsoft's P.R. agency, Waggener Edstrom.

You may find it interesting that Pam Edstrom's daughter Jennifer and a former Microsoft manager wrote the book, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. (August 15, 1998, eight years earlier) The Amazon.com review says the book "... presents a harsher and messier history, sharply questioning Microsoft's ethics and corporate wisdom..." The book seems authoritative; the authors certainly had inside access to the facts. It's certainly unusual that the daughter of one of the heads of Microsoft's P.R. agency would write a book discussing Microsoft's abusiveness in detail.

I get your point, but need to mention that Xerox has been selling laser printers for many, many years. The book Dealers of Lightning claims that their profits from laser printing have easily paid for all of the research done by PARC.

Also, Xerox did not invent the mouse, and has never claimed to have done so.

HUH? cheapest?

http://www.amazon.com/Phone-Adapter-Interface-connects-network/dp/B000JCU88S

$25.00 is less than $40.00 you must not have looked very hard, that was my first hit on amazon.com. I have seen them for $9.95 for generic usb-> phone interfaces that work under linux and windows.

This isn't a specific text, but see Colin Wells' Sailing from Byzantium. Wells discusses the legacy of the (poorly named) Byzantine Empire, including how knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans was transmitted to the west and to the Arabs.

You know, something like a third of web-site porn consumers these days are women, and women are the fastest growing demographic of porn consumers. This is why the market should decide.

If you haven't read this book yet you should.

(True not all porn is created equal. There is some really interesting porn films out there which have received raving reviews in magazines like "Women's Health" and "Oprah Magazine.")

Galen Gruman is the author of the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible, so it's a good bet he is biased towards Apple and against Android.

I have owned several Android devices and I haven't had significant compatibility problems. Some software takes a little while to get updated to the latest version of Android, but that's pretty much it.

i want a portal gun

here is your closest real-life version
http://www.amazon.com/Hole-Pro-X-305-infinitely-adjustable/dp/B000G1O8YM/ref=sr_1_30?ie=UTF8&s=hi&qid=1266950247&sr=8-30
not as cool.

I'm absolutely glowing that this wasn't brought forward earlier. This is something I would never want to happen on my watch

believe that book is for ppl learning programming. the book you REALLY want is this one

For those reading the criticisms of this book and looking for an alternative... I have been working my way through this book. It is excellent. It's the book I wished I'd had when I tried CS years ago:

http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Introduction-Computer-Science/dp/1887902996

I was under the impression that EC2 starts and stops new instances of your system, up to whatever limit you specify, based on load.

Actually, you're essentially right: while basic EC2 doesn't do this for you, Amazon CloudWatch does provide Auto Scaling. CloudWatch is an extra service you can purchase for each instance; I had forgotten about it since we don't use it. I don't know the details about Auto Scaling, but I'm sure you can get them from the link above.

This is. Don't confuse people. Its also not the idiot's guide, for dummies.

I understand its a figure of speech, but its not a very good one and may confuse people with a different product.

I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested.

I feel like I should be marked redundant for how often I mention it, but I feel it worth mentioning on the topic of MMO's and particular since you mentioned the Bartle Test. If you're familiar with the Barlte Test are you familiar with his book: Designign Virtual Worlds?. The book is a bit dated by todays terms but still very insightful in the genre of MMO's. I believe the book mentions a little bit about Dark Age of Camelot as it was the "new" thing that was barely out when the book came out. Even then, the points he makes remains true. It's worth a read. He mentions why "PvP" centric games don't work for the masses and it's as obvious as you would expect: "Griefing". Most people don't want to spend their time playing "their" game to have someone else take most or all away from them, particularly without much recourse as a truly open world allows some much more powerful person to prey on the less powerful for shits and giggles.

There are some people who enjoy that kind of game, but not enough to get some AAA development house to make a game for it. MMO's aren't cheap to develop and their not easy to do right. Even looking at World of Warcraft, the game is pretty different now than it was at release (this might be a good time to mention I started MMOing at the early days of Everquest, missing UO and MUDs, but I've tried most MMOs since that point) and it's still scheduled to change quite a bit with the next expansion. And I mean this by saying, when WoW game out, it was criticized for being far and away the most casual friendly MMO there is... and it pales in comparison to how casual friendly the game is now.

Anyway, I digress. PvP games will always be niche and less successful simply because they can't design around "griefing" without getting to the point that for all the safety measures you put in place to protect the weak from the powerful until some level of equality is reached makes it to the point that you might as well just remove PvP all together and just implement power (often translated into level) restricted "arena/battleground" areas.

Onto the question about player housing. That's more along the lines of a development issue. Do you spend your man-hours working on new dungeons, lands, weapons, content, balance issues, spells, etc or do you spend it on implementing something like housing? And what does housing do to a game? How does it fit with the guided flow and purpose of said game?

Blizzard has recently stated why they haven't implemented housing (as one of the most popular requests for player generated like content or world customization) and that reason is that it both doesn't seem to have the value of spending resources on it vs other things as-well-as housing could (and likely would) have a negative impact on the atmosphere of the game. Guild houses and personal houses will become little cities onto themselves and people will segment farther into their own little cliches and cities will become more and more desolate. You could try to design around that. Force houses to be in cities or to reach it you can only enter leave through a city. Prevent houses from being any more than empty space that you could perhaps put some digital art.

But all developers simply ask themselves, what does this do to make the game better? Not much. Games like WoW can't just popular houses anywhere in the world. Like DAoC, you'll have to create special instanced zones that can have housing, so you can create as much or little space as you need as needs grow. If you allow people to build houses anywhere, then you'll have the issues of people placing stuff that just breaks the atmosphere.

And you could say "what's wrong with t

Finally, read a good algorithms book (can't think of any examples, sorry).

Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen et al. I have the 2nd edition, but the 3rd seems to have come down in price a bit now.

Amazon has some great cloud services. http://aws.amazon.com/products/ They are incredibly cheap (no minimum costs), and scale instantly.

No, four legs are better for a large machine. There's a tradeoff between leg working envelope, vehicle length, and top speed.

There was a big fad for six-legged insect robots in the 1990s, led by Rod Brooks at MIT. Those were very slow, very dumb, and had a very wide stance. Six legs don't scale up well. One big issue is inertia.

Double the dimensions of something, and it gets four times as strong (strength comes from cross-section) but eight times as massive (mass comes from volume.) This is called the cube-square law, and it's why there are no giant insects. For small creatures, forces like surface tension matter, but inertia doesn't. For large, fast ones, inertia dominates.

Before dynamic balance was figured out, robots tended to have very wide stances, and some had too many legs. DARPA built funded the Adaptive Suspension Vehicle at Ohio State in the 1980s. 28 feet long, six legs, seats one, no cargo capacity. Top speed 3-5 MPH on flat ground. At least three legs were on the ground at all times, and often four, five, or six. The gaits were very conservative. It was supposed to be off-road capable, but that part never worked. A sloping road was as far as they got. There was some computer control, but the thing was mostly driven by an onboard driver, using three joysticks.

With dynamic balance and traction control, the leg geometry doesn't have to be as conservative. BigDog's leg geometry is four legs with three joints each, a narrow stance, and control which allows the leg envelopes to overlap. This is close to the layout of the larger quadrupeds. (BigDog has the size and weight of a medium pony; it's bigger than dog-size.)

With four legs and a long body, pitch stability isn't too hard, but roll stability requires active control. The faster quadrupedal mammals have very narrow stances; a horse's track is less than a foot wide, narrower than its body. BigDog doesn't track quite that narrow, but it gets close. The narrow track makes tight turns possible, and allows sudden changes in yaw when needed for slip recovery or collision avoidance.

With dynamic balance and slip control, the speed can be cranked up. The six-legged machines mostly crawled; the modern four-legged machines trot, and some run. (The usual running gaits, the ones with a moment of suspension, for a quadruped are the trot, pronk, rotatory gallop, and canter. BigDog can trot and pronk; it may be able to do a rotatory gallop.) That's the real reason to go with four legs. Six legs just get in the way at speed.

BigDog's three-joint leg isn't mentioned much, but the third joint lets the control system adjust the ground contact force vector to stay within the friction cone, without changing the foot position. This is a big win when climbing hills, and the hind end needs to come under the body.

It's all about the control algorithms. Don't let the legs collide, prevent slip, recover from slip, support the body, maintain roll balance, provide propulsion, avoid obstacles, stay on course, accomplish the mission. Those are the priorities.

If you want to understand the theory behind BigDog, read Didier Papadoupolis's thesis, "Stable Running for a Quadruped Robot with Compliant Legs". The technology for BigDog came from Martin Buehler's lab at McGill University. Buehler himself quit McGill and went to work for Boston Dynamics as the chief engineer on BigDog. (Once BigDog worked, he went to iRobot.) The theory is out there in the literature. Some of it is mine.

"International Terrorism: Image and Reality" by Noam Chomsky, notable linguist and self-declared Libertarian Socialist
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm
"""
There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence." ... The answers are not difficult to find. We must simply abandon the literal approach and recognize that terrorist acts fall within the canon only when conducted by official enemies. When the US and its clients are the agents, they are acts of retaliation and self-defense in the service of democracy and human rights. Then all becomes clear. ...
"""

There are many related comments by Chomsky on this:
  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=chomsky+terrorism

Even a book:
    "excerpts from the book: The Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky"
    http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Culture%20of%20Terrorism.html
    http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Terrorism-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0896083349

More here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky's_political_views

And, not by him, but here is an essay by Prof. G. William Domhoff on why non-violence is the only moral and rational approach to social change in the USA:
    http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

I'm taking Java this semester and we're moving on to Data Structures.

This is the book my class is using. It's written by my professor and it seems pretty good.

I'm not a coder but after scrolling down the thread some... Lot of fail in the replies. All these mastermind coders didn't read what you wrote, they seem to have hallucinated what they wanted to read instead.

Maybe this is why there is so much bad code out there, they get shown an outline of what needs to be done by the people cutting the check, then half understand it at best, and go off on a tangent and do something else, then blame that eventual failure on their bosses or customers.

If I knew what would be good reading material to advance your Java understanding for you I'd forward it, but I don't. I apologize for the guys here who probably know but are too caught up on bragging about how good a coder they are and how you don't need a degree, etc.

I found this with a google search, some amazon java book list, a lot of cheap used ones there, fit your megare pay budget probably. Good luck.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Java-Books/lm/1OO093FMQ6VE

Oh, my non smart but feature phone appreciates lightweight quality java apps. TIA to you or whoever writes them. Not all of us can afford 500 dollar smartphones and thousand to two thousand dollar yearly "plans", but we'd still like some apps that work well on cheap phones.

I would point you to Three Felonies a Day by Harvey Silverglate.

Silverglate should have a great deal of appeal here. He was deeply involved in the ACLU, was a founding member of FIRE, and was the first litigation counsel for the EFF.

Wow, I had never heard of "Special Agent Oso" that I remember. Creepy. Still, we will do better in a democracy by creating alternatives than by censoring. We need to make it easier for parents to find better media alternatives, and better non-media alternatives to having their kids immersed in such things.

You're right about early indoctrination. Although, it's also true that all education is a form of indoctrination in some sense. The issue is mainly, what values and habits and assumptions are we passing on? And that's something every person in our society should reflect on (and no one is perfect, of course). I grew up on 1970s stuff like Sealab 2020, Mr. Rogers, The Magic Garden, New Zoo Review, Star Trek, Electric Company, the old Sesame Street, Yogi and his Friends, and so on, and they (hopefully) shaped my values in positive ways, along with many other influences from books, individuals, and organizations (including some positive aspects of schools and teachers).

Here are two books co-written by the same educator (Diane E Levin) which talk about the problems resulting from an unhealthy alliance between toy makers and media makers in the 1980s that displaced a lot of 1970s children's media (especially since media regulation in the USA under the "family values" era of Roland Reagan), one about the problems mostly boys face (locked into violent play) and one about the problems mostly girls face (locked into sexualized roles):
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But what you link to moves in yet another direction, acquiescence to continual intimate surveillance, like in Orwell's 1984. Some of this may not be intentional by the authors as just a reflection of changing cultural norms powered by other things. A related slashdot article from just now:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/075223/The-Surreal-World-of-Chatroulette

One can sometimes read malice where there was just ignorance or difference or change. Still, often media is both a message and has other messages embedded in it reflecting the norms of the people who pay a lot of money to produce it.

Here is a related item on thinking about media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
"How to read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald in Spanish) is a political analysis book, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, published in Chile in 1971. It is seen as a pioneering work on cultural imperialism. Written in the form of essay (or as a decolonization manual, as described by the authors[1]), the book is an analysis of mass literature, specifically the Disney comics published for the Latin American market. It's considered a key work of its genre, mainly because it is one of the first social studies of two broad subjects: entertainment and the leisure industry from a political-ideological angle, and the problem of children's literature, meaning by this the analysis of cultural products which have children as main targets.[2]"

Another example is how Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory celebrates capitalism, secrecy, discarding workers to replace them with automation and half-humans, copyright, patents, not sharing, competition, and a bunch of other negative stuff -- which actually is all good for the conventional (wealthy) movie maker's bottom line.

Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer or Good Will Hunting also has some weird message in them, when you think about it. A comment by me here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.

Wow, I had never heard of "Special Agent Oso" that I remember. Creepy. Still, we will do better in a democracy by creating alternatives than by censoring. We need to make it easier for parents to find better media alternatives, and better non-media alternatives to having their kids immersed in such things.

You're right about early indoctrination. Although, it's also true that all education is a form of indoctrination in some sense. The issue is mainly, what values and habits and assumptions are we passing on? And that's something every person in our society should reflect on (and no one is perfect, of course). I grew up on 1970s stuff like Sealab 2020, Mr. Rogers, The Magic Garden, New Zoo Review, Star Trek, Electric Company, the old Sesame Street, Yogi and his Friends, and so on, and they (hopefully) shaped my values in positive ways, along with many other influences from books, individuals, and organizations (including some positive aspects of schools and teachers).

Here are two books co-written by the same educator (Diane E Levin) which talk about the problems resulting from an unhealthy alliance between toy makers and media makers in the 1980s that displaced a lot of 1970s children's media (especially since media regulation in the USA under the "family values" era of Roland Reagan), one about the problems mostly boys face (locked into violent play) and one about the problems mostly girls face (locked into sexualized roles):
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But what you link to moves in yet another direction, acquiescence to continual intimate surveillance, like in Orwell's 1984. Some of this may not be intentional by the authors as just a reflection of changing cultural norms powered by other things. A related slashdot article from just now:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/075223/The-Surreal-World-of-Chatroulette

One can sometimes read malice where there was just ignorance or difference or change. Still, often media is both a message and has other messages embedded in it reflecting the norms of the people who pay a lot of money to produce it.

Here is a related item on thinking about media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
"How to read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald in Spanish) is a political analysis book, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, published in Chile in 1971. It is seen as a pioneering work on cultural imperialism. Written in the form of essay (or as a decolonization manual, as described by the authors[1]), the book is an analysis of mass literature, specifically the Disney comics published for the Latin American market. It's considered a key work of its genre, mainly because it is one of the first social studies of two broad subjects: entertainment and the leisure industry from a political-ideological angle, and the problem of children's literature, meaning by this the analysis of cultural products which have children as main targets.[2]"

Another example is how Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory celebrates capitalism, secrecy, discarding workers to replace them with automation and half-humans, copyright, patents, not sharing, competition, and a bunch of other negative stuff -- which actually is all good for the conventional (wealthy) movie maker's bottom line.

Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer or Good Will Hunting also has some weird message in them, when you think about it. A comment by me here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.

Bah.

This is way more reliable:

http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Office-WM-01-Laptop-Steering/dp/B000IZGIA8/

Laptop Steering Wheel Desk

To fully appreciate the utility of this marvelous device, click on "customer images"
I especially like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B000IZGIA8/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_1?ie=UTF8&index=1

Bah.

This is way more reliable:

http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Office-WM-01-Laptop-Steering/dp/B000IZGIA8/

Laptop Steering Wheel Desk

To fully appreciate the utility of this marvelous device, click on "customer images"
I especially like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B000IZGIA8/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_1?ie=UTF8&index=1

If you want to work in the real world, writing software, you're going to have to speak to other engineers about what you are doing at a level of abstraction higher than "for loop" or "switch statement". You'll want to talk about algorithms and even more commonly, patterns. You may already be familiar with "tree" and "linked list" so you're off to a good start. But, in the future, you'll find yourself saying: "This is a visitor", "this is a controller", "this is a command pattern", etc. The current "bible" of these patterns is known as the Gang of Four book:
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns/dp/0201633612

That one is a hard read. I understand that a more digestible book is this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Holub/dp/159059388X/

Two other routes you will want to go down is that of algorithms, like you already mentioned, and refactoring. Algorithms are the most common next step in College, so it might be wise to do that before patterns and refactoring, but I don't think either is a prerequisite for the other. But, knowing what "Big O notation" is, and understanding why a divide and conquer sort is so fast is helpful in your career.

Finally, refactoring seems to be the hidden art of writing good code. So few programmers really understand how to refactor bad into good. This advanced topic will be what sets you apart from the other engineers you compete with for a job. This one is a good "bible"
http://www.amazon.com/refactoring/dp/0201485672

If you want to work in the real world, writing software, you're going to have to speak to other engineers about what you are doing at a level of abstraction higher than "for loop" or "switch statement". You'll want to talk about algorithms and even more commonly, patterns. You may already be familiar with "tree" and "linked list" so you're off to a good start. But, in the future, you'll find yourself saying: "This is a visitor", "this is a controller", "this is a command pattern", etc. The current "bible" of these patterns is known as the Gang of Four book:
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns/dp/0201633612

That one is a hard read. I understand that a more digestible book is this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Holub/dp/159059388X/

Two other routes you will want to go down is that of algorithms, like you already mentioned, and refactoring. Algorithms are the most common next step in College, so it might be wise to do that before patterns and refactoring, but I don't think either is a prerequisite for the other. But, knowing what "Big O notation" is, and understanding why a divide and conquer sort is so fast is helpful in your career.

Finally, refactoring seems to be the hidden art of writing good code. So few programmers really understand how to refactor bad into good. This advanced topic will be what sets you apart from the other engineers you compete with for a job. This one is a good "bible"
http://www.amazon.com/refactoring/dp/0201485672

If you want to work in the real world, writing software, you're going to have to speak to other engineers about what you are doing at a level of abstraction higher than "for loop" or "switch statement". You'll want to talk about algorithms and even more commonly, patterns. You may already be familiar with "tree" and "linked list" so you're off to a good start. But, in the future, you'll find yourself saying: "This is a visitor", "this is a controller", "this is a command pattern", etc. The current "bible" of these patterns is known as the Gang of Four book:
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns/dp/0201633612

That one is a hard read. I understand that a more digestible book is this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Holub/dp/159059388X/

Two other routes you will want to go down is that of algorithms, like you already mentioned, and refactoring. Algorithms are the most common next step in College, so it might be wise to do that before patterns and refactoring, but I don't think either is a prerequisite for the other. But, knowing what "Big O notation" is, and understanding why a divide and conquer sort is so fast is helpful in your career.

Finally, refactoring seems to be the hidden art of writing good code. So few programmers really understand how to refactor bad into good. This advanced topic will be what sets you apart from the other engineers you compete with for a job. This one is a good "bible"
http://www.amazon.com/refactoring/dp/0201485672

i recommend "Refactoring to Patterns" http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Patterns-Joshua-Kerievsky/dp/0321213351 It's really down to earth and shows how to apply design patterns on existing code in java.

It may be too early in your education to know what you want to do in your career, but I would start looking in to areas where you can specialize. Client/server architecture will always be a skill that looks good. If you want to go this route, look into learning Java Enterprise Edition. UI design is good to know, but with abundance of WYSIWYG editors that are available now, writing UIs is becoming less of a skill. UI design theory is still pertinent even if the coding skills are going the way of the dodo. Some other skills that will come in handy are writing web services, database interaction (with JDBC and JPA, both good to know), and multi-threading. I would also recommend the book Head First Design Patterns to get started on learning how to design software (as opposed to just writing software).

I would agree with what a lot of people have been saying, though. The best thing that you can do is put what you know in to practice. Start out writing a small application for yourself. Write unit tests.Do some code coverage analysis on the code and make sure you are completely covered. You can start with Cobertura. Get to know what APIs are available in JSE. I'm assuming that in an academic environment you are using the latest JSE (6), so I would also look into familiarizing yourself with JSE 1.4. There are some major differences between 1.4 and 5 (and not a whole lot of major differences between 5 and 6), and if you are working on legacy code in the future, it helps to know what differences there are. Write an app in whatever you are used to using, write it again with JSE 1.4. Check out an open source project and debug it. Get code coverage on the project and write tests to cover more lines of code. Most OSS projects would be happy to integrate tests that increase their code coverage. Look through the bugs that have been logged against the project. Pick something small, fix the bug, and submit patches. Get familiar with build systems like Maven 2 or ANT. That should keep you busy until next semester.

Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes. They also target the 2.5" SATA market because it gives them an immediate in. Directly into new desktops and systems without consuming a slot the high performance people who would buy these are likely shoving an excess of games into. The high end is already using those slots for storage.

Believe me, the industry -is- looking into ways of getting SSDs on to faster buses, but it takes time and some significant rearchitecture. Also, NAND sucks ass, with high block failure rates fresh out of the fab outweighed by sheer density. And it's only going to get worse as lithography gets smaller.

From what I gather, the performance limit is actually largely in the controllers, otherwise FusionIO's workstation class cards wouldn't perform as well as they do, despite using a relatively small number of MLC chips. Similarly, if the limit was caused by Flash, then why is it that Intel's controllers shit all over the competition? The Indilinx controllers got significant speed boosts from a mere firmware upgrade! There's a huge amount of headroom for performance, especially for small random IOs, where the controller makes all the difference (storage layout, algorithms, performance, caching, support for TRIM, etc...).

And there's no need to "rearchitect" at all! PCI/PCI-e is old, storage controllers of all sorts have been made for it for decades. There are RAID or FC controllers out on the market right now that can do almost 1GB/sec with huge IOPS. It's not rocket science, storage controllers are far simpler internally than, say, a 3D accelerator.

I also disagree that people are running out of expansion slots. On the contrary, other than a video card, I haven't had to use an add-in card for anything for the last three machines I've purchased. Motherboards have everything built-in now. Server and workstations boards have so many expansion sockets, it's just crazy.

If you think that's bad, consider that the Virtex5 they're using on it costs on the order of $500 for the chip itself. You linked the "pro" model, which supports multiple devices in the same system in some fashion. You want this one, which is only $900. Both models use MLC NAND, and neither are really intended for mass-market buyers (you can't boot from them, after all.)

Precisely my point! Every vendor is making some stupid compromises somewhere. Using an FPGA is really inefficient, but still better in some ways than what everyone else is doing, which ought to really make you wonder just how immature the market is.

Similarly, look at the price difference between the two FusionIO drives, the "Pro" and the "Non-Pro" model. I bet there's no physical difference, because all of the specs are identical, but there's a 2x price difference! It's probably just a slightly different firmware that allows RAID. This is artificial segmentation. If they had decent competition, the drive would cost 1/4 as much per GB, and all models would allow RAID.

It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes. They also target the 2.5" SATA market because it gives them an immediate in. Directly into new desktops and systems without consuming a slot the high performance people who would buy these are likely shoving an excess of games into. The high end is already using those slots for storage.

Believe me, the industry -is- looking into ways of getting SSDs on to faster buses, but it takes time and some significant rearchitecture. Also, NAND sucks ass, with high block failure rates fresh out of the fab outweighed by sheer density. And it's only going to get worse as lithography gets smaller.

The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

No, it's because the thing's running an Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA. It also costs a ton as it's using 96GB of SLC NAND, and is part of a fairly modular design that is reused in the io-drive Duo and io-drive Quad.

Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks

If you're referring to the older JMicron drives that failed utterly at 4K random reads/writes, then you're mistaken. That was the case of a shit controller being exposed. Even the Indilinx controllers, which paled next to the Intel chip, outclassed mechanical drives at the same task.

on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

If you think that's bad, consider that the Virtex5 they're using on it costs on the order of $500 for the chip itself. You linked the "pro" model, which supports multiple devices in the same system in some fashion. You want this one, which is only $900. Both models use MLC NAND, and neither are really intended for mass-market buyers (you can't boot from them, after all.)

I'm kinda fed up waiting for the SSD manufacturers to get their act together. There's just no reason for drives to be only 10-50x faster than physical drives. It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

I suspect that most drives we're seeing are too full of compromises to unlock the real potential of flash storage. Manufacturers are sticking to 'safe' markets and form factors. For example, they all seem to target the 2.5" laptop drive market, so all the SSD controllers I've seen so far are all very low power (~1W), which seriously limits their performance. Also, very few drives use PCI-e natively as a bus, most consumer PCI-e SSDs are actually four SATA SSDs attached to a generic SATA RAID card, which is just... sad. It's also telling that it's a factor of two cheaper to just go and buy four SSDs and RAID them using an off-the-shelf RAID controller! (*)

Meanwhile, FusionIO makes PCI-e cards that can do 100-200K IOPS at speeds of about 1GB/sec! Sure, they're expensive, but 90% of that is because they're a very small volume product targeted at the 'enterprise' market, which automatically inflates the price by a '0' or two. Take a look at a photo of one of their cards. The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

This reminiscent of the early days of the 3D accelerator market. On one side, there was the high-performing 'enterprise' series of products from Silicon Graphics, at an insane price, and at the low-end of the market there were companies making half-assed cards that actually decelerated graphics performance. Then NVIDIA happened, and now Silicon Graphics is a has been because they didn't understand that consumers want performance at a sane price point. Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks, which just boggles the mind, and on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

Back when I was a young kid first entering university, SGI came to do a sales pitch, targeted at people doing engineering or whatever. They were trying to market their "low-end" workstations with special discount "educational" pricing. At the time, I had a first-generation 3Dfx accelerator in one of the first Athlons, which cost me about $1500 total and could run circles around the SGI machine. Nonetheless, I was curious about the old-school SGI machine, so I asked for a price quote. The sales guy mumbled a lot about how it's "totally worth it", and "actually very cost effective". It took me about five minutes to extract a number. The base model, empty, with no RAM, drive, or 3D accelerator was $40K. The SSD market is exactly at the same point. I'm just waiting for a new ''NVIDIA" or "ATI" to come along, crush the competition with vastly superior products with no stupid compromises, and steal all the engineers from FusionIO and then buy the company for their IP for a bag of beans a couple of years later.

*) This really is stupid: 256GB OCZ Z-Drive p84 PCI-Express is $2420, but I can get four of these 60GB OCZ Vertex SATA at $308 each for a total of $1232, or about half. Most motherboards have 4 built-in ports with RAID capability, so I don't even need a dedicated controller!

You get multiple lives

But, yeah, the no save/restore kind of sucks.

You get multiple lives

But, yeah, the no save/restore kind of sucks.

Already happened to me! Bought a 52" LG Plasma TV. When I got it home, forgot to do the research and was surprised to find no analog audio output! I had always wanted a DVR so decided to kill two birds with one stone: Hooking up my old 1980s stereo was as easy as looking on amazon.com and buying this box with old school cable in and hdmi and audio rca jacks out. http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-DR570-Recorder-Built-Tuner/dp/tech-data/B001TOD3KK/ref=de_a_smtd

What we have is a perfect recipe for greed!

HDMI is becoming the single cable solution for everything.

Ethernet. Audio Return. 3D over HDMI. 4Kx2K video support in HDMI 1.4 and so on. The 6' HDMI 1.4 cable isn't $60. It's $8.50. PTC ALL NEW 6 ft Premium GOLD Series Dual tone HDMI 1.4 High Speed HDMI Cable

I think the path were headed on is rental or purchase of optical media for the full theater experience and on-demand streaming for everything else. Nursing the P2P download of an amateur's H.264 rip isn't going to be worth the trouble.