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For Haskell, Real World Haskell is probably a better option (more like Programming Erlang, and practical).

In particular, it talks a lot about multicore programming.

"I am a pacifist but i love military tech. Is that sick?"

No. Look at entertainment, if you judged people by the entertainment they watched the prisons would be full. We like the idea of destroying stuff and violence, but does liking violent movies like SAW 3 - make everyone who watches it sick?

The truth is humans (generally) are infinitely curious they want to explore every nook and cranny of existence, I would imagine most people would try / watch or do anything once within that individuals limits, if no one could find out about it, not because humans are 'bad' or 'evil', but because they want to know what the experience is like.

http://www.amazon.com/Saw-III-Unrated-Full-Screen/dp/B000LC3IDI/

>

ML for the Working Programmer

Did you mean: me for the working programmer?

NOOOOO!

I've recently gotten into FP. I started with Erlang and then branched into ML and Haskell. In case you're interested, here are the best books I've encountered for each language:

Programming Erlang

Programming Haskell

ML for the Working Programmer

Also, I'd definitely recommend starting with Erlang, because the Programming Erlang book made for a very easy introduction to functional programming.

I've recently gotten into FP. I started with Erlang and then branched into ML and Haskell. In case you're interested, here are the best books I've encountered for each language:

Programming Erlang

Programming Haskell

ML for the Working Programmer

Also, I'd definitely recommend starting with Erlang, because the Programming Erlang book made for a very easy introduction to functional programming.

I've recently gotten into FP. I started with Erlang and then branched into ML and Haskell. In case you're interested, here are the best books I've encountered for each language:

Programming Erlang

Programming Haskell

ML for the Working Programmer

Also, I'd definitely recommend starting with Erlang, because the Programming Erlang book made for a very easy introduction to functional programming.

These data must be public to begin with, or they wouldn't host them:

If you have a public domain or non-proprietary data set that you think is useful and interesting to the AWS community [...] You must have the right to make the data freely available.

(How to share a public data set on AWS)

So I guess there isn't even a license. Free as in go grab 'em.

I say: who vouches for the validity of the data set itself? I understand that some of the sets are already publicly available, but that doesn't mean all.

Did you even look at their public data sets page? Every one of the public data sets they've listed has source information. They are already, at this very moment, providing information on who/where they came from.

The one I looked at also had extensive sets of README files explaining the source and format of the data, and I'd imagine it's true for the others as well.

To really understand the intention of Berlusconi you must understand that Italy is a modified socialist government itself. This man has his fingers in every sector of Italian business. I invite you to read "The Dark Heart of Italy, by Tobias Jones which outlines how deep this problem goes." Berlusconi owns the RAI, the government controlled television. He also has his fingers in AGIP which is the one gas (petrol automobile fuel) vendor that is also controlled by the government. Other gas stations may not sell gas at a rate under that which is set by AGIP. The bottom line is that this man is very powerful, very rich and not going anywhere soon.

A recent figure came out in BBC stating that the mafia run businesses in Italy are operating at the 120 billion range which is enormous in contrast to Fiat's 50 Billion a year market share. My guess as an Italian speaking American is that this man really wants some form of revenue in the form of taxes out of the deal because piracy belongs to the mafia in Italy and TPB et. al. is cutting into its share. In fact Italy's government controlled telecoms "Telecom Italia," has been known to block TPB but I am unsure they are currently doing this or blocking torrent traffic.

Then again, this is coming out in the register and notably not the most reliable source of information IMHO.

PS: To my amusement and Italy's shame, he stated that we elected a "very tan" president.

it's not feasible to have that kind of bandwidth sitting around unused except for a few days every 6 months, nor is it currently feasible to get that much bandwidth on-demand for a website

Ahem.

It costs money, yes -- but it's certainly possible.

Look to Amazon software top 10, you will be really surprised.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software/ref=sv_sw_0

First is MS Office (yes, true) and second is MS Office for MAC! MS makes huge money from OS X software sales. If you remember the best, optimistic market share of OS X is 10%...

Norton Antivirus at #3 of that list should be very alerting for a sane OS vendor BTW.

ps:it is a dynamic list so it may change

For all the hype that Android was to be an open platform, there's no sign yet of a phone that is completely hackable by the end user. The docs are out there, such as The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development , so we could see a utopia of community-driven apps, but it seems like Google is uninterested in the end user's extendibility of the platform, which was supposedly it's raison d'etre.

This is more of a sign of the break down in community vs. individualistic values than a sign of income disparities.

At first glance, I agree with you.

On reflection -- thinking like an anthropologist, here -- I wonder if the breakdown of community values into individualistic values tends to parallel the breakdown from richer to poorer.

Reasoning: members of a community are more likely to create and accumulate wealth than loners. I'm speaking here of the long run (discounting short-run loner wealth, e.g. lottery, bank robbery, etc.).

Seen in this light, the breakdown of community values into lone wolf values would be accompanied by reduced accumulation of wealth.

This is speculation based on intuition; I have no evidence or authorities to back this up. I should mention that I'm not an anthropologist, although anthropology does run in the family.

I'm thinking (extreme analogy here) of how Peter Farb, in his excellent Man's Rise to Civilization, explains the near-universal taboo on incest. In brief, Farb argues that cultures which permit incest tend to be endogamous (marrying within the group), whereas the incest taboo necessitates exogamy (marrying outside the group). Exogamous cultures are better able to generate and accumulate wealth, therefore they out-compete endogamous cultures; in time, endogamous cultures disappear (or sink into an ugly criminal underground).

You and everybody else who thinks that your brain is anything more than a piece of meat which observes the world through obvious and direct means should read The Demon-Haunted World. Among other things, our brain is really good at picking out "unusual" occurrences and completely ignoring the mundane. The two times that you and your lover tried to call each other simultaneously stand out in your brain far more than the hundred thousand times that it didn't happen, and even though probability tells you that there's an obvious explanation for what happened, your brain is built in such a way that you will think it's important. Fighting against this impulse is key to understanding how the world works but it's quite difficult.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliard is what it is. Not a noob question. And if you hadn't asked, I wouldn't have found this sweet item to give to my grandpa: http://www.amazon.com/Millard-Fillmore-Mouse-Pad/dp/B0013E3QB2

http://www.amazon.com/Millard-Fillmore-Mouse-Pad/dp/B0013E3QB2

http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-World-Dreaming-Stephen-Laberge/dp/034537410X/ref=pd_sim_b_1

try that book, maybe you will have a little luck there. You can probably fix your number problem if you work at it.

Read: http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Spears-Account-Conquest-Mexico/dp/0807055018

Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception.

Dammit.

Next thing you know those awful secularists will be claiming that anecdotal stories of "I saw Jesus three days after He died" represent something fundamentally normal about the human experience.

Those damn secularists might suggest that such anecdotes may say more about the grief and mourning of people for a really nice peaceful human guy, than about the magic powers of the dead really really nice peaceful human guy. It's a good thing that no one ever made claims that differed from the early Christian church that ended up dominating the orthodoxy.

And don't even get me started about Elvis. I saw the King with my own eyes the week after he faked his own death, I tell you what.

The Long Blondes are a great band, their album Someone to Drive You Home was IMHO one of the best releases of 2007. Highly recommended, especially if you love earlier indie efforts like Pulp. I hope we hear more from them.

Why not leapfrog AI and go directly towards cognition, aka synthetic reasoning? "The Cognitive Dynamics of Computer Science" by S.M. deGyurky. In chapter 14 he details the computer architecture of a reasoning system, and postulates 4 levels of autonomy.

Office costs $400ish retail.
A MacBook costs retail.

If Microsoft sells 70 million copies of office and it costs $5 (that's high) to package and ship and $700 million to produce (that also likely high), then they are spending $15 per package (making $385), which gives them a 96% profit margin. Apple would need a 65% profit margin to match that, and even though they do probably have a relatively high profit margin, that's ridiculous for a hardware company.

Office costs $400ish retail.
A MacBook costs retail.

If Microsoft sells 70 million copies of office and it costs $5 (that's high) to package and ship and $700 million to produce (that also likely high), then they are spending $15 per package (making $385), which gives them a 96% profit margin. Apple would need a 65% profit margin to match that, and even though they do probably have a relatively high profit margin, that's ridiculous for a hardware company.

If you are just generally interested in learning about AI, and not specifically Neural Networks. I highly highly recommend reading A Field Guide to Genetic Programming. Genetic Programming is really cool! and this is a wonderfully written book. Fun to read and easy to understand, great for anyone with a beginning or advanced knowledge of computer science. Best of all, it is freely downloadable under Creative Commons. Or you can order a print on demand copy from Amazon or Lulu.

I also highly recommend reading some books that are not directly related to AI. Checkout How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. He is a phenomenal author.

I don't really see why discussing MVC is as all that and a bag of chips as the author contends. I commonly use the concept of MVC with respect to Django and when I do I always reference this book:

Design Patterns, Elements of Resuable Object-Oriented Code

Using the definitions as described in this book Django easily fits in the MVC design pattern.

People I work with "get it" and I've not encountered and confusion alluded too by the author when using the term as defined by the aforementioned book.

Language is always evolving and that is how non-technical words end up with multiple variations in the common language dictionary. I see no reason why technological terms should be excluded from this "language pattern". There is no notion that technogical terms have to stick to some "original definition". The book above provides a working definition that is common and clear.

David MacKay's Book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms. It written at a high level and is an extremely difficult read (MacKay puts more information on a page than most do in half a dozen).

MIT has been publishing their classes online for some time now on OpenCourseWare. I suggest you check out 6.034 Artificial Intelligence from the Fall 2006 semester.
They were using Patrick Winston's Artificial Intelligence. Might be worth a look.

I'd recommend "The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" by Ray Kurzweil. The first chapter is a bit dense, but it really picks up from there. It touches on a lot of highly technical issues, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, without being overtly technical itself. It would be a good launch-point into some heavier reading, is it contains a very extensive bibliography and recommended reading list.

Penguin has an excerpt from Chapter 6: Building New Brains

The venerable Duda & Hart book on pattern clasification: its old first edition was focused on probabilistic (bayesian) aproach, but new edition is very different, gives a broad view of pattern clasification and learning techniques, including neural networks.

These might seem a little old, but are still a couple of my favorites:
Reinforcement Learning by Sutton & Barto
Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell

These might seem a little old, but are still a couple of my favorites:
Reinforcement Learning by Sutton & Barto
Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell

My girlfriend and I both like Bic Atlantis. If that's not your pen of choice, you're definitely wrong.

Yes? There are a few out there.

Everykeyboard shortcut in every Cocoa app is configurable. It is just a conf file you have to change. Do a websearch of Erica Sadun's book to get the details.

The religious right puts forward an omnipotent God that watches us everywhere we go and ultimately judges all of our actions and determines the state of our eternal soul. So they are already inherently conditioned to this big brother mentality.

Hogwash. Most religious conservatives view government warily. "Religious right" figures like Chuck Colson and Francis Schaeffer have argued that we must beware of "Big Brother" tendencies in government, which tend to squash religious freedom.

Believing in a good God who sees everything does not predispose me to wanting a government of flawed humans who see everything. A central tenant of Christianity is that humans have evil tendencies. The value of democracy is to prevent some people from having too much power of others.

This quote from C.S. Lewis, a very influential Christian thinker, sums it up:

It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

I'd argue that people who believe that Heaven will come after we die are less prone to trying to create it on earth. It's more often the atheists, who want their Utopia now, who try to make governments powerful enough to create it.

About Godel: J.R. Lucas
The 'Minds, Machines & Godel' and 'Implications of Godel's Theorem' are particularly good.

Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe
A good summary of ID theory from 3 of its main proponents. The philosophical angle is approached more by Stephen Meyer (including his thoughts on Kant) so his essay (the second in this book) and its reference list in particular would interest you. He only alludes to much of the discussion which I, being only an armchair philosopher, have yet to fully discover and appreciate. [But, he does make it clear that there's much written thought on these topics].

IAAL and i know he is marked as a troll but he is perfectly correct.

The original post stated that he used a kindle book to print. This is disallowed :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144530

QUOTE:

The Kindle Store enables you to download, display and use on your Device a variety of digitized electronic content, such as books, subscriptions to magazines, newspapers, journals and other periodicals, blogs, RSS feeds, and other digital content, as determined by Amazon from time to time (individually and collectively, "Digital Content").

and

Use of Digital Content. ... Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

So unless express rights to print and store were provided with the ebook, printing an ebook from a kindle is illegal, even for non commercial personal use.

In short, no ebooks are sold by amazon, only licensed. You do not have the rights that you think you have.

ATTENTION: This is a posting on an internet forum and as such cannot be construed as legal advice. Contact an attorney licensed in your state for legal advice. This posting is not confidential and not covered under any form of confidentiality and cannot be construed as forming an attorney-client relationship in any form whatsoever.

So far, there is no evidence that anything in biology is irreducibly complex.

I strongly disagree.

For example, even if we leave aside all the other intricate parts of the human vision system, the relationship between the retina and the brain would be a good example. The retina does a lot of signal processing in order to the obtain 12 separate versions of a visual scene which are passed on to the brain (one is mainly a line drawing of edges, some deal with motion in a particular direction, some deal with shadows and highlights, etc.) The brain then integrates and processes all of these in order to give us a coherent perception. The retina's processing makes no sense without the capacity of the brain to make sense of it all - but the brain having the capacity to interpret this data makes no sense without the retina's abilities in place. (Much of this is taken from Sarfati's book).
 
 

"Specified complexity" is another bit of Intelligent Design jargon, but they've never managed to come up with a coherent definition, probably because it is an oxymoron. A "specification" generally means a concise description of something, and truly complex things have no more concise description.

I don't understand what you mean by calling it an oxymoron. To say something is "truly complex" is not concise (concise means brief, but comprehensive), it is merely vague. Sarfati explains why specified complexity points to design at length in the same book linked above (which I reference because I am currently reading it). I think he is right in saying that we can tell something has been designed because it is neither regular nor random. No intelligent person who saw Mt. Rushmore for the first time would conclude that it had occurred naturally. Natural processes produce either regularity (reoccurring and predictable), or randomness (vastly unpredictable). The heads on Mt. Rushmore are not a regular pattern, each part is unique and not the next step in a predictable series of events. Nor are they random at all. They are the result of an intention to depict faces. They are too complex to arise out of randomness or the regularity of natural laws, but specific enough to be distinguishable as someone's intention. Specified complexity.

And his Rainbow Coalition, shakedown artists.

What you're asking, is to be treated as an intelligent, independent Person.

I've been geeking for nearly 1.5 decades, and our CULTURE opposes that:
the Western put-down culture is torqued-up in the academic/geek culture, so that obstacles are placed to "prove" others' inferiority ( which shows some vastly stinking insecurity... )

It takes integrity to know that one doesn't know omniscience, and to enable others instead of disabling 'em ( & to remember that ANALOG computers, ie our brains, malfunction in odd ways -> see "panic" for circuit-override in counter-to-survival-way ).

*Living* integrity.

Read "Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines" ( David H. Freedman ) for principles that counter our failure-manufacturing culture...
http://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-Marines/dp/0066619793/

( including "tell 'em WHAT, the End-State, and WHY, the understanding, and LET 'EM WORK OUT THEIR OWN WAY.
Their way will suit them better, may be an innovation that supersedes your known-way, and its discovery/development will be enabling of 'em.
Obliterating their way, for your way, is insulting, disabling, and demeaning.
Do you get smarter when you're trusted to try? or only when you're prevented from doing so?
( as an aside, if one has created software whose UI make wrong-usage more likely than right-usage, then one hasn't learned from "The Design of Everyday Things" http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0465067107/ , and could be considered incompetent as a designer )

Rule of 3: one can only maintain *simultaneous* knowing of 3 points of responsibility. If there are more than 3, split 'em between people/teams.
Anyone pouring concentration into remembering their points of responsibility, ISN'T pouring that concentration into solving 'em!

The 75% solution: better an imperfect plan ( see eXtremeProgramming ), implemented NOW, than a Perfect Solution, implemented Too-Late-To-Make-Any-Difference. )

that's 3 of 'em...

It's an excellent book that counters our unconscious anti-pattern programming, written by a Forbes senior editor ( "this isn't what they say: it's what they do" ).

What you're asking, is to be treated as an intelligent, independent Person.

I've been geeking for nearly 1.5 decades, and our CULTURE opposes that:
the Western put-down culture is torqued-up in the academic/geek culture, so that obstacles are placed to "prove" others' inferiority ( which shows some vastly stinking insecurity... )

It takes integrity to know that one doesn't know omniscience, and to enable others instead of disabling 'em ( & to remember that ANALOG computers, ie our brains, malfunction in odd ways -> see "panic" for circuit-override in counter-to-survival-way ).

*Living* integrity.

Read "Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines" ( David H. Freedman ) for principles that counter our failure-manufacturing culture...
http://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-Marines/dp/0066619793/

( including "tell 'em WHAT, the End-State, and WHY, the understanding, and LET 'EM WORK OUT THEIR OWN WAY.
Their way will suit them better, may be an innovation that supersedes your known-way, and its discovery/development will be enabling of 'em.
Obliterating their way, for your way, is insulting, disabling, and demeaning.
Do you get smarter when you're trusted to try? or only when you're prevented from doing so?
( as an aside, if one has created software whose UI make wrong-usage more likely than right-usage, then one hasn't learned from "The Design of Everyday Things" http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0465067107/ , and could be considered incompetent as a designer )

Rule of 3: one can only maintain *simultaneous* knowing of 3 points of responsibility. If there are more than 3, split 'em between people/teams.
Anyone pouring concentration into remembering their points of responsibility, ISN'T pouring that concentration into solving 'em!

The 75% solution: better an imperfect plan ( see eXtremeProgramming ), implemented NOW, than a Perfect Solution, implemented Too-Late-To-Make-Any-Difference. )

that's 3 of 'em...

It's an excellent book that counters our unconscious anti-pattern programming, written by a Forbes senior editor ( "this isn't what they say: it's what they do" ).

And he was good there as well.

Well, the real question, is should it be legal to put this kind of drm in software, that we then put in our computers? The downloading of the software is something that people will do.

I think, people think its acceptable, because we live in a country that is founded by people that "broke the law."
This actually reminds me of the Boston tea party. Especially the whole spore thing.

The "Hydrogen Economy" was partly the result of a stupid book by Jeremy Rifkin. Read it and note how little it says about where the hydrogen comes from. It was promoted by the Bush/Cheney crowd as a means for diverting attention from electric cars.

Using electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, then liquefying the hydrogen, storing it as a liquid, then recombining it in a car (either in an engine or a fuel cell) is incredibly inefficient. The only advantage over batteries is that it looked like it might provide more range. Battery energy density has improved in the last decade, though. Battery cost is still a problem. But none of the hydrogen cars are cheap. Nor do they really have that much range. Arnold's hydrogen-powered Hummer only has a 60-mile range.

BMW actually built about 100 "hydrogen powered" cars. But they mostly run on gasoline; although they can optionally run on hydrogen, that's mostly for PR purposes. The liquid hydrogen tank has a "use it or lose it feature"; the BMW vehicle will evaporate all its hydrogen in about 10-12 days.

It looks like an idea whose time has passed.

I don't know if it's still in production, but we have a Fisher Price Easy Link that's an easy-to-use web environment for toddlers. With just a mouse and a bunch of the keys, they can change websites without having to worry about about the kids getting out of their 'sandbox' or having to type in anything.

All you really need is one key for the Disney site and one for the PBS site. You can then use internal links to find all the other pages so you don't need to shell out extra cash for each and every key. I wish they'd make one for the Noggin site too.

Since they're really just ordinary websites with addresses assigned to the keys, my main complaint is that you can't add new sites that aren't associated with the keys. There are stories online about being able to edit the XML config file, but it never worked for me. I guess you could always just edit your hosts file...

Agreed, and as for a kid friendly computer that can do a fair amount... how about OLPC?

Buy one get one. http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?ie=UTF8&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&me=A34NLXJLC88VVS

Baby's First laptop might be a good idea.

When my son was 3 I gave him a Windows 98 machine with a 300 Mhz Pentium II processor and educational software like "Jumpstart Baby" and "Just Me and my Grandpa" installed on it.

Before that he got the $20 to $30 toy laptop, and when he didn't destroy that thing he got the real computer later.

Baby's First laptop might be a good idea.

When my son was 3 I gave him a Windows 98 machine with a 300 Mhz Pentium II processor and educational software like "Jumpstart Baby" and "Just Me and my Grandpa" installed on it.

Before that he got the $20 to $30 toy laptop, and when he didn't destroy that thing he got the real computer later.

We've got one of these:

http://www.amazon.com/Vtech-Tote-Go-Laptop-Plus/dp/B000E1PY6U

And it serves it's purpose just fine. Our 2 1/2 year old can recognize most of the letters already. She's obviously not using all the games (some are a little beyond her, frankly), but it's nigh-indestructable, and $20 if they happen to destroy it.

We don't really encourage its use, but she picks it up from time to time anyway. I still have more fun with the blocks, personally.

Well, teach him how to use ping then...

Here is a user manual more appropriate to his age range.