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"As I tell students on the first day of the course, there are no promises that they will fall in love with math, but they may be able to glimpse a life where they do not have to hate it. Math is unlike many other subjects in that one failure may cause a lifelong disbelief in one's mathematical skills. But it doesn't always have to be that way. It took me a long time to learn what a joy this discipline can be."

The real problem though is the way math is expressed and approached, I take the geometric approach to mathematical concepts and principles. I've been doing research into numerals and how numbers are expressed, and expressing 5 or 7 as a geometric shape enhances understanding a lot of the time when doing basic calculations since you can see the parts of the number itself in the shape at a glance. Arabic numerals tend to mask a lot of hidden mathematical relationships. Not only that our current system of math is merely one way to express math, there are other more enightening systems that I've been looking into and plan to write about when I get the time.

Math unfortunately has expressed in a such a jargonistic fashion when it doesn't have to be, math can be taught in many ways in terms of other things, like music, art and color, geometry, etc... it doesn't have to be taught in the way it is mostly taught from textbooks and curricula today, even though their are pockets of lucky schools and teachers that realize this.

(books)
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/

http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

"As I tell students on the first day of the course, there are no promises that they will fall in love with math, but they may be able to glimpse a life where they do not have to hate it. Math is unlike many other subjects in that one failure may cause a lifelong disbelief in one's mathematical skills. But it doesn't always have to be that way. It took me a long time to learn what a joy this discipline can be."

The real problem though is the way math is expressed and approached, I take the geometric approach to mathematical concepts and principles. I've been doing research into numerals and how numbers are expressed, and expressing 5 or 7 as a geometric shape enhances understanding a lot of the time when doing basic calculations since you can see the parts of the number itself in the shape at a glance. Arabic numerals tend to mask a lot of hidden mathematical relationships. Not only that our current system of math is merely one way to express math, there are other more enightening systems that I've been looking into and plan to write about when I get the time.

Math unfortunately has expressed in a such a jargonistic fashion when it doesn't have to be, math can be taught in many ways in terms of other things, like music, art and color, geometry, etc... it doesn't have to be taught in the way it is mostly taught from textbooks and curricula today, even though their are pockets of lucky schools and teachers that realize this.

(books)
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/

http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

That's not at all what actually happens. You should read John Perkins' book Confession of an Economic Hitman

You can find interviews of him explaining it all over the internet. It has nothing to do with "lasse-faire" capitalism.

The IMF/World Bank gives a country (normally with a valuable natural resource) a loan it knows it can't pay off to build infrastructure that benefits only a few big corporations, normally foreign. Once the country defaults, the banks get the country to sign over its infrastructure and natural resources to them and other corporations.

That isn't capitalism of any form. It is legalized theft.

To pick a random example from my collection of incompatible hardware, Microtek isn't helping the SANE project make drivers for its ScanMaker 4850 flatbed scanner.

That's OK. It looks like they're doing you a favor. If it makes you feel any better, they don't support Vista either.

He was talking about a one time pad. That is indeed mathematically impossible to decrypt given a random seed source. Like absolutely impossible. As to the RSA and NSA I have no idea what you are talking about. Perhaps you should read this

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on him, since it's not like he's forcing me to buy the book. I just feel like there's a societal obsession with getting our kids to "mature" as fast as possible, rather than just letting them be kids.

I'd trust him to handle it well. This isn't a new direction - I bought my daughter Mars Needs Moms a couple years ago. The climax is built around a mildly terrifying premise for a toddler, but it's so well done it's a "read it again, Daddy!" book. Even though it's still terrifying each time.

But I enjoy big f*ing roller coasters, so maybe it's in the genes. One playgroup-mom was thoroughly horrified. I was so happy about that, her eyes bugged out. She likes to insulate her kids to the point of a 9-year old not knowing where meat comes from, so, we're pretty far apart in most regards.

Doesn't puncuated equilibrium say that once a species has achieved equilibrium with the environment, evolution slows down? The human species is thriving in terms of reproduction, so it would make sense that evolution will "slow down" or "stop". We also have invented ways of beating the effects of climate change, by constructing houses and clothes, and shipping food, so that humans can thrive in pretty much any climate. I'm currently reading The Blind Watchmaker and I just got to the chapter on punctuated equilibrium so I wish I could elaborate further on it.

"Highly intelligent, creative, socially supportive guys" can go out and read The Mystery Method. It's written by a former Dungeons and Dragons dork. Yes, it works. It's easier than you think.

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Calvin-Hobbes/dp/0740748475/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223560779&sr=1-1

I recently purchased this and have been amazed at the strips I missed. The collection books really do leave a lot out and C&H are timeless. Frankly, I enjoy C&H much more and it both children and adults can enjoy it at the same and for different reasons

I belong to a generation too young to have appreciated Bloom County. Rather, the first work of Breathed I encountered was Outland, which I thought bizarre, pointless and just downright not funny. If I hadn't come across the Bloom County collection Billy and the Boingers Bootleg at a friend's house (belonging to his cool older brother), I would have never known the comic genius that Breathed could be. Opus has generally felt even less fun than Outland, which shows a sad decline in the cartoonist's art.

It's remarkable that Bloom County is still so hilarious, when the minutiae of life under the Reagan administration is all but forgotten by readers today, yet a topical strip like Opus is just so meh.

I wish that he had given up the characters in 1989 at their prime like Bill Watterson was wise to do, instead of continuing them as a source of financial security. It seems like a curse of nerd culture is a flood of sequels that diminishes the impact of the original, quality material. We've seen it with Star Wars, umpteen science fiction novel universes from Dune to Ender's Game, and even the quirky strip that was Bloom County.

You should try reading The Real Lincoln by Lorenzo.

I can dismiss a lot of the things Lincoln said and did which today would seem racist, but the book has a lot more than that.

It spends a lot more time dissecting the reasons Lincoln went to war, his police state and his economic agenda. He uses a lot of sources from the time period to make his cases.

> I bought it out of guilt, but I doubt I have gotten my moneys worth.

I usually figure if I get _anything_ at all out of a book than it's worth the price. I just bought a Puppet book and just having it around for occasional skimming has gotten me familiar enough with Puppet that I'm willing to give it a whirl. And for $17.99, meh, good enough.

Agreed, the human brain is greater than the sum of its parts. It's easy to show that a robot is equal to a human but it's difficult to believe that a collection of circuits feels the range of emotions and instincts biologically passed down through the ages.

The author of the book and Piccard both sucessfully argue that Data is equal to a human. The most familiar arguments come from the TNG episode "Measure of a Man" in which Starfleet tries to claim ownership of Data so that they can dismantle him.

KlaymenDK is better known as Jan Gundtofte-Bruun , and is an IT Specialist at IBM Denmark A/S since 1998. This a photo of him.

He is about to build a new PC, and plans to use FreeBSD, mainly as a quad-core, dual-headed, desktop workstation, but would very much like to be able to play the occasional BZFlag (call him oldschool).

You can also peruse his Amazon profile, etc. What strikes me is that he was apparently involved in the sound department of Festen, a great Danish movie.

http://www.amazon.com/Java-Concurrency-Practice-Brian-Goetz/dp/0321349601/ref=pd_bbs_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223461483&sr=8-4

I learned threads from this book by W. Richard Stevens. I have to warn you that Stevens' books are specific to C, but he has a clear and concise style, and his treatment of the basic issues such as synchronization, locking, shared memory, and semaphores is excellent. If you're coding in C, buy the book; if you're not coding in C you may not need to own it, but you ought to spend a couple hours reading Stevens' discussion of key issues.

here goes nothing Programming Perl in Dot Net

One I remember from university was the 'dinosaur' book, "Applied Operating Systems Concepts" by Ali Silberschwartz, Peter Galvin, and Greg Gagne.

Although not a book on thread programming per se I remember it had lots of discussion about threads, semaphores, mutexes, shared mem, resource locking etc and I think good understanding of these topics is essential before you dive into trying to write and debug multi-threaded programs!

Especially if you already have significant programming experience I guess you mainly want the theory anyway.

I think it had exercises around these topics using Java as the teaching language to demonstrate the concepts. (If I'm still thinking of the same book)
http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Operating-Concepts-Abraham-Silberschatz/dp/0471365084?tag=particculturf-20

Science-fiction author David Brin got quite a bit of attention here on Slashdot when he began talking some years ago about how one cannot preserve privacy in the modern world, and that what we have to do instead is adapt to people knowing so much about us. See his book The Transparent Society .

Ah yes, the guy who wrote the book titled "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture" or the full subtitle of "How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values".

Some more great quotes from Andrew Keen in an interview with Paula Newton on CNN.

"I think we've got to learn to read and listen to professionals rather than ourselves, because ultimately they're the ones who are experts, they're the ones who know how to collect the news, they're the ones who know how to make great music and compelling movies not ourselves. "

"The beauty of mainstream media is that you have editors, you have gatekeepers, who are relatively objective, who are professional, who ensure that the majority of the news is unbiased."

Perhaps one of these days I'll actually read into this guy some more under the guise of "Know Thy Enemy", but at the moment I have better things to do with my time.

He's also given a talk at Google by the way.

Joe Duffy (of the .NET Parallel Extensions team) has an excellent book due to be published very soon:

Concurrent Programming on Windows

Here's one I found useful: Multithreading Applications in Win32 by Jim Beveridge and Robert Wiener. It's a little dated (no coverage of .NET, for example - it's more focused on C/C++), but it still provides a good introduction to threading and synchronization on Windows.

If you can find an inexpensive used copy, it's worth a read.

However I am looking for a good book on programming threads from an applied point of view. I am looking for one or more texts that provide thorough coverage and provide meaningful exercises. Anyone have any ideas?

I went through grad school not too long ago for Computer Science (disclaimer: it was the kind of computer science degree that doesn't focus on hardware so I might not be the best expert on this). Anyway there were two books for the class.

One dealt with coding regular old C on a plain jain Unix machine and method of (I believe there are others) doing multithreaded in that environment is PThreads (or the super short overview). The book we used is the Addison Wesley book (ISBN 0-201-63392-2). It was informative and comprehensive ... wasn't concentrated specifically on applications like you ask but very good reference. Also, I think there are a lot of good books free online in respect to that topic.

As for Java, there was an O'Reilly book (there's probably a new version out for Java 6) that was pretty good. Not as great of a reference but better on applications of threads in Java. Although, as far as introductory material, I personally learned it all from java.sun.com. Although I can't vouch for whether this is an applied approach or not, I would suggest the concurrency tutorial and a good book on Java Patterns or even a design pattern wiki.

I've never done concurrent programming in C# or Python so I do not know first hand what is best. I do know that erlang has been fun to mess around with in my spare time though!

Recently I have been incorporating them more in my solutions for clients.

Most important rule of thumb of multi-threaded programming is to avoid it if possible. Maybe hardware (multi-core) will change that, maybe you feel the scheduler can't do its job as well as you can and maybe you feel it's more intuitive. But, often is the case, that you're just adding more complexity to your code resulting in more difficult bugs and harder maintenance for others. Keep it simple.

LED backlit LCD monitors run in the $1,500+ range.

Really?

Damn, I need to get into your supply chain.

I'm trying to learn OpenGL so I can program in Open GL ES for my iPhone, and it seems like you need a book specifically for ES, because OpenGL ES eliminated most of the features used in beginning OpenGL tutorials!

But the iPhone supports only 1.1 and so I'm wondering if this book would even work for me. I'm thinking its rival, Mobile 3D Graphics ... might be better.

Any thoughts from those who have checked out both books? It would be nice to have good information before I blow $50.

Thanks!

D

Flash drives are already being given away for free. Optical media readers have never dropped below $10 in my experience, and I believe those were clearance prices.

If you meant media, which is what I suspect you mean, then it's anyone's guess as to what the pricing will be. A quick check on Amazon reveals a number of sub-$5 1Gb SD cards. Sub-$1 SD cards in the medium term? Doesn't seem impossible to me.

Nintendo DS games are shipped on cards smaller than CompactFlash cards and only slightly larger than SD cards. I don't see any reason why SD cards can't be used to distribute content.

I used to work with cattle on my uncle's farm when I was a kid. They are dumb animals. They do dumb things. Anytime you try to move them, they do all kinds of stupid shit. I've seen them get "trapped" in fencing, in ditches, even in bushes and trees.

I grew up around cows and many other animals. They are not dumb animals. Read the book Animals in Translation where the author talks specifically about why cattle behave as they do.

I agree though, the system is stupid and can't compete with what a few good cowboys can do.

I have a gut feeling everyone's talking at cross purposes.

At this point, distributing the same 50Gb of content to 100,000 people is probably most cheaply done with Blu-ray as long as those 100,000 people are also going to get many, many, many 50Gb-of-content packages in the same format from numerous other sources. So, as a movie distribution technology, optical media kind of works.

This works because it's cost effective for those 100,000 people to spend $200ish on a Blu-ray disk reader, and it's cost effective to get a duplicator to press 100,000 Blu-ray discs at approximately $2.50 per disc.

However, when you start reducing the numbers on either side, the price differentials start to radically change. It's cheaper for me to put the content on a cheap USB hard drive, even at $100 a pop, if I'm just distributing to a few tens of people, who aren't planning on obtaining Blu-ray readers. And it's even cheaper for me to burn the same content to DVD-R, given a dual layer DVD-R costs around $2, whereas a dual-layer BD-E costs around $15-20 - they're getting close per gigabyte, but the cost of obtaining Blu-ray burners, and the receiver of the data obtaining Blu-ray readers obviously changes the cost effectiveness of the whole thing.

Ok, so that's the current situation. Now let's look at the situation in three years.

Flash memory is coming down in price. Less than a year ago, I bought an 8Gb SD card for around $80. Four months later, I bought a 16Gb SD card for $80. A quick Amazon search shows that while 32Gb cards seem to still be relatively expensive, 16Gb is easily available for around $32. The cost of adding an SD card reader to a computer is around $1. No, I'm serious. They're actually giving away the readers with many cards now. So we're looking at flash memory gigabytes-per-dollar ratios doubling every three to six months. 50Gb for under $20 (BD-RE price) should be... well, that's about $90 now, so that's about a year and a half away, assuming a six month (being conservative) pricing half-life. Another year and a half, and, well, we're looking at 50Gb of flash costing less than 50Gb of pressed Blu-ray media does today. Actually, we're more likely looking at 128Gb SD cards costing $10.

So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.

Hmm, sounds like The Producers a classic Mel Brooks comedy. For people who haven't seen it here's the gist, timid accountant Leo Bloom explains to shifty Broadway producer Max Bialistock how he could make money on a flop play. Basically, all he has to do is oversell shares in the play by a huge amount, then when they play tanks, no one will expect their shares of the profits.

Then, much as in the current derivatives market, hilarity ensues.

Oh, also, frighteningly prescient was an episode of Really Weird Tales (an SCTV movie that's hard to find now) about a small town making money on no money down home sales. Why the whole town got rich selling houses to each other! Then those people got rich by reselling the houses to other people in the town. Until, finally, well I won't spoil the ending but it kind of has been spoiled by Congress....

Actually, no one explains it better than my favorite blog, Dr. Housing Bubble

Larry Niven's first published short story was titled "The Coldest Place" (collected in 3 Books of Known Space ), based on the idea that the regions of Mercury not hit by the sun would be the coldest place in the solar system. The story was infamous out of date by the time it hit print, as some studies of Mercury had shown that it never got that cold. Nonetheless, reading the story as a child awoke a certain interest of that planet which never gets as much attention as the sexier Mars or Venus or the gas giants. I look forward to following this mission.

I know this comment will probably get buried but I am one of the people who CAN NOT wait for MMORPGs to hit the console. I will resub EQ (or any other MMO) as soon as it will work on my PS3.

Your wait was not needed.

http://everquestonlineadventures.station.sony.com/ It's a PS2 game but works just fine on the PS3. You did do the smart thing and buy a PS3 with PS2 backwards compatibility. If you didn't, PS2's are cheap, and that'll run on a slim PS2.

It's available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Everquest-Online-Adventures-Frontiers-Playstation-2/dp/B0000CDZB9

There's also Final Fantasy XI: http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/

You have to create a PS2 partition on your PS3 hard drive for that one, and it won't work on a slim PS2 without a hard drive.

Protip: There was a PC version.
http://www.amazon.com/Final-Fantasy-XI-Online-Pc/dp/B0000E2OBD
Did you even spend the 2 seconds it would have taken to find that out?

This is simply untrue - GM Judit Polgar (FIDE 2711) is ranked 27th in the world in FIDE's latest rankings list. I would recommend Chess Bitch for more information about women in chess. Also, regarding the grandmaster losing to Rybka: human grandmasters have lost to computers in tournament time controls for many years now. However, humans still dominate at correspondence chess: for example, GM Arno Nickel won a match against Hydra in 2005.

Amazon is currently selling DRM free MP3s, heres' a sample page:

Amazon MP3 Store

They'll work on whatever cheap crummy MP3 player (or high quality MP3 player, or iPod) you want to use. You can make as many copies as you want, record MP3 CDs, the works. Shouldn't the RIAA be crying bloody murder?

Or is it just that the pressure from RIAA is just a pretext, and Apple doesn't want people to be able to easily use their competitors players? I'm not being cynical, it just doesn't make sense to me since even not technically savvy people can undertand the value of un-DRMed MP3s over the alternative, iTunes should have a competitive disadvantage.

Yeah.. because..you know.. when the seeds for this were sown in 1977 the Congress was Democrat controlled and it was signed by a Democrat president. In 1995 President Clinton made regulatory changes (no need for the consent of the Republican Congress) that put the program on steroids, paving the way straight to our current crisis.

So, you're suggesting that a law that:

1) was passed 31 years ago
2) applies only to federally-insured banks and thrifts and not to the non-bank mortgage companies that made the majority of the sub-prime loans
3) George Bush weakened in 2004 with no apparent decrease in subprime activity
4) does not appear to lead to unprofitable lending

caused the sharp upward trend in unprofitable loans that did not coincide with either 1977 or 1995? Oh, and of course, the banks making these bad loans (knowing full well that they were bad--they were under duress, you know), decided to borrow huge sums of money to make huge numbers of them in order to massively leverage their losses (which they expected to be losses--you know, the CRA made them make those loans against their will). Well done indeed.

It was after this that FM/FM started taking on the risky loans to comply with the heightened standards.

I'm not going to claim that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enacted wise regulations during the run-up, but for God's sake, they lost significant market share to asset-backed securities issuers starting in about 1999. You're suggesting that organizations that don't originate mortgages and have been declining in significances (especially in the sub-prime market) are responsible for a huge up-tick in sub-prime mortgages? I salute you.
Notably absent from this discussion is the fact that the types of derivatives that made these securities as attractive as they were happened to become deregulated at just about the same time the asset backed securities market started to eat away at Fannie and Freddie's mortgage holdings.

Bottom line: Let's see your numbers. From what I can see, this is an example of a spectacular lack of oversight in a new and "innovative" market that got out of control. The economic theory bears it out well, the time line works, and the numbers seem to favor that explanation. There's no reason to appeal to things like the CRA or FM/FM to explain the sudden run-up in available credit to low-quality borrowers. I'm willing to hear a detailed explanation, if it makes economic sense and has some data behind it, though.

Bush tried to fix this in 2003, but the Democrats killed it.

Of course, I'm sure that Mr. Responsible governance and regulation tried everything he could to get a tighter grip around those guys, but it was 2003, and his party only controlled both houses of the legislature. Sure, he got whatever he wanted in those days, but woe to those who cross Barney Frank, especially when he's in a minority party that couldn't seem to do shit when it came to pushing its agenda.

Frankly, any argument that's being pushed by Kevin "Dow 36000" Hasset needs a little bit of hard data backing it up before I buy into it, especially when it appears to run counter to the facts and expert opinion. Basically, I'm thinking, Kevin Hasset vs Janet Yellen. Who gets the benefit of the doubt on data-driven matters of economic policy?

Grmek's History of AIDS from 1993 is quite good and interesting.

Please don't mark this as troll or flamebait. It is a serious post about a serious topic.

I'm guessing you've never done any research on the subject.

You've probably never read Dr. Len Horowitz's book Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional?

You've probably never read NSSM 200 signed by Henry Kissinger where it states that the third world population is a national security threat to the US.

You may not have seen documents from the Congressional Record where people discuss creating "a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired."

2. Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon when we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.

Or maybe you haven't read about the 1000's of times our government has tested biologicals, chemicals, radiologicals on its own citizens.

You also might want to read the law that allows the government to experiment on its own citizens just about anytime it wants.

(b) Exceptions
            Subject to subsections (c), (d), and (e) of this section, the
        prohibition in subsection (a) of this section does not apply to a
        test or experiment carried out for any of the following purposes:
                (1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical,
            therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or
            research activity.
                (2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against
            toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.
                (3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related
            to riot control.

In 2000 The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) wrote a paper called Rebuilding America's Defenses. It talked about using race specific bioweapons as a useful tool.

advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

PNAC is filled with top Bush administration officials, including Dick Cheney.
If you don't like any of my sources you are free to use google or any other source to verify that what I've said is true.

I don't recall the article, but Asimov's book of MANY years ago summed up that our universe could be itself a black hole based on the consistent size/mass ratio required.

http://www.amazon.com/Collapsing-Universe-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0091317703

"Mathematics in necessarily abstract. It is the science in which one disconnects interesting patterns from their context and studies them in their own right. A great deal of effort also goes in to applying general mathematical knowledge in a particular context."

You're not grasping what I'm saying, I'm saying the expression of math - i.e. the current symbolic form it takes, can be expressed in many different ways.

See here:

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/

"A lot of people devote a lot of their time in explaining their areas of mathematics to the general public (including myself). And as for your distaste for abstraction."

It's not the abstraction that's hard, it's the divorced nature of mathematics from the physics of the everyday world, I've been studying physics again in my off time and I am certain that math and physics are the same subject and should be studied as a unified subject, not divorced as they currently are in most schools around the world.

Not only that, the actual number systems themselves make math a lot harder then it is for some people. I've been experimenting and researching numeral systems that use geometric patterns, and many mathematical abstractions become infinitely easier when you use shapes and color as represnetations for your numerals, and it makes addition and subtraction (of some kinds) that much easier to see at a glance, instead of playing with rather clumsy arabic script.

If we think about it from a physics standpoint, all truth is derived from information from the environment is bombarding us with, is math really just inequalities in the information our body is receiving? I have to wonder, consider "A house" and "1 house" technically you could do computations with "a" and not lose any meaning whatsoever.

"Amazon.com Review

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems."

I've been studying this -- see here:

http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/

I personally thing neurological sciences are going to have a lot to say about mathematical knowledge and many mathematicians and math buffs are not going to like it.

Quotes:"Thought and language are neural systems, they work by neural computation, not formal symbol manipulation." -- Page 8, embodied processing. (Molecule to metaphor)

"Language is inextricable from thought and experience" - Page 1. (molecule to metaphor)

"A lot of people devote a lot of their time in explaining their areas of mathematics to the general public (including myself). And as for your distaste for abstraction."

It's not the abstraction that's hard, it's the divorced nature of mathematics from the physics of the everyday world, I've been studying physics again in my off time and I am certain that math and physics are the same subject and should be studied as a unified subject, not divorced as they currently are in most schools around the world.

Not only that, the actual number systems themselves make math a lot harder then it is for some people. I've been experimenting and researching numeral systems that use geometric patterns, and many mathematical abstractions become infinitely easier when you use shapes and color as represnetations for your numerals, and it makes addition and subtraction (of some kinds) that much easier to see at a glance, instead of playing with rather clumsy arabic script.

If we think about it from a physics standpoint, all truth is derived from information from the environment is bombarding us with, is math really just inequalities in the information our body is receiving? I have to wonder, consider "A house" and "1 house" technically you could do computations with "a" and not lose any meaning whatsoever.

"Amazon.com Review

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems."

I've been studying this -- see here:

http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/

I personally thing neurological sciences are going to have a lot to say about mathematical knowledge and many mathematicians and math buffs are not going to like it.

Quotes:"Thought and language are neural systems, they work by neural computation, not formal symbol manipulation." -- Page 8, embodied processing. (Molecule to metaphor)

"Language is inextricable from thought and experience" - Page 1. (molecule to metaphor)

"A lot of people devote a lot of their time in explaining their areas of mathematics to the general public (including myself). And as for your distaste for abstraction."

It's not the abstraction that's hard, it's the divorced nature of mathematics from the physics of the everyday world, I've been studying physics again in my off time and I am certain that math and physics are the same subject and should be studied as a unified subject, not divorced as they currently are in most schools around the world.

Not only that, the actual number systems themselves make math a lot harder then it is for some people. I've been experimenting and researching numeral systems that use geometric patterns, and many mathematical abstractions become infinitely easier when you use shapes and color as represnetations for your numerals, and it makes addition and subtraction (of some kinds) that much easier to see at a glance, instead of playing with rather clumsy arabic script.

If we think about it from a physics standpoint, all truth is derived from information from the environment is bombarding us with, is math really just inequalities in the information our body is receiving? I have to wonder, consider "A house" and "1 house" technically you could do computations with "a" and not lose any meaning whatsoever.

"Amazon.com Review

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems."

I've been studying this -- see here:

http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/

I personally thing neurological sciences are going to have a lot to say about mathematical knowledge and many mathematicians and math buffs are not going to like it.

Quotes:"Thought and language are neural systems, they work by neural computation, not formal symbol manipulation." -- Page 8, embodied processing. (Molecule to metaphor)

"Language is inextricable from thought and experience" - Page 1. (molecule to metaphor)

Umm, what a strange link you chose for the PSP.

The PSP 2000 retails for $169.99 in the US.

The PSP 2000 is only 170 bucks, not 214:

http://www.amazon.com/PSP-2000-Console-Piano-Black-Sony/dp/B000UA0LXQ/

There's also price. Of course pandora has many more features, perhaps a comparison is in order. @#$!@#$ slashdot doesn't support tables, so this is the best I could do :

Pandora

Pandora
ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz CPU
128M ram
3D opengl ES 2.0 acceleration
800x480 4.3" touchscreen LCD
Wifi
Keyboard
dual SDHC card (both expansion and storage)
Internal battery and USB charger
$329.99 / £199.99 (Inc VAT) / E249.99 (Inc VAT)

GP2x WIZ

Wiz
533Mhz ARM CPU
64M ram
3D opengl acceleration
OLED Touch Screen 2.8" 320x200
No wifi (BUT easy to add because of USB host)
No keyboard (BUT again, easy to add because of USB host)
single SD card (both expansion and storage, 99% sure SDHC card)
Internal battery and USB charger (thank God ! compared to GP2X F-200 this is heaven)

US$ 179.90 (~124.32 EUR)

PSP

PSP
PSP cpu 333Mhz
32M ram (64M for the psp slim)
3D acceleration (?)
480x272 LCD screen (great screen imho)
Wifi
MS pro duo expansion (expensive, only storage)
Internal battery and USB charger
Probably USB host capability but not useable

US$ 213.99 (179 euro)

Surprisingly of all these devices it's the PSP that has the largest library of emulators (even a "somewhat playable" n64 emu, something the pandora devs think impossible (read the gp2x forums ... well ... euhm tomorrow should be better, right ?)

As an ebook reader the PSP blows the socks of the WIZ though, even if just because of larger screen, and it is also larger than the pandora, so I wonder.

This list is limited to devices with actual useable gaming controls. The iphone/ipod touch and the nokia n810 are obvious competitors, but lack (decent) gaming controls. Actually the n810 is kinda nice, I ought to try one.

I am in disbelief over anyones the acceptance of the idea. Relinquishing control over your data to an outside source seems unfathomably retarded, no matter what kind of spin is put on it.

I am thinking that your problem is both immaturity and the assumption that cloud computing is supposed to replace everything. Well, it's not. No, it's not supposed to replace those applications where you put in your credit card info or social security number (whatever the hell that is). It might claim that it can but why would you do that?

Brace yourself but there are in fact applications for things like ec2 from Amazon. What if I wanted to design an informative website that might provide details and directions to a brick & mortar store while at the same time store comments from users?

I'm not putting any spin on this, I'm just pointing out that Cloud Computing has a place. It might be smaller than what the companies tell us, it might be larger than what we think. But to outright rule out a potentially cheap, distributed, robust service like this as a developer is really really closed minded. I'm personally willing to give it a chance as I build on open source frameworks and have a lot of applications I would like to toy with that don't deal in sensitive data. And I don't have a whole lot of change laying around to do it!

At the very least, a sudden release of mass amounts of methane could create immense hurricanes, even if no ignition takes place. The entertaining science fiction disaster novel Mother of Storms by John Barnes is based on that premise.

Indeed there are. I wrote a book on this:

Policing Online Games

It's far from the last word.

For more information:

http://www.wayner.org/books/pog/

To look up on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0967584426/myhomepage0bc

It's a great treatment of this precise topic.

Check it out here:

Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology

It's an excellent book on the topic, with plenty of technical descriptions and the problems associated with the idea.

"Actually it is rather specific. They want you to build a working brain simulator with a math foundation rather then guesses at what the brain is doing biologically."

What they are asking for is a contradiction in terms, math is derived from thought, we do not think using abstract formal systems, we think using direct neurological computation, the "mathematics" we have invented is not the language of the brain, it is a derivitive language of some more basic unified language.

Math is the problem, the brain does not work by formal symbol computation, math is derived from neurological computation. This has been scientifically studied. See:

http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/