Slashdot Mirror

No idea how useful this is for development, but Amazon is offering an unlocked Samsung I321N phone for $165 until 2pm PDT as a gold box deal. It runs Windows Mobile 5.0, and since it's unlocked I would imagine you should be able to load apps onto it with no problems.

It's often dealt with by putting a DC link between two independently-synchronized AC grids.

I heartily recommend a book called "Infrastructure" by Brian Hayes http://www.amazon.com/Infrastructure-Field-Guide-Industrial-Landscape/dp/B001CB2A2W/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219886141&sr=1-1. It's a coffee table book that goes into moderate detail about a lot of the modern infrastructure, including power generation and transmission, railroads, highways, phone network, oil and gas production, and much more. I'm still working my way through it. Fascinating reading for armchair hacker wanna-bes.

I would think the burden of proof is on the group that is willing to throw people in jail "for the common good", rather than the group that prefers to allow people to trade in goods and services freely.

Anyway, if you'd like a good writeup of the concept, I would recommend David Friedman's book The Machinery of Freedom. David is the son of the late-great Nobel-prizewinning economist Milton. He simply takes his father's ideas to their logical conclusion.

You'd definitely be interested in reading
  Legacy of Ashes, a
great (but depressing) book detailing the history of CIA, by Tim Weiner.

It's actually pretty common.

It's actually pretty common.

Think of what we could have included: the music that influenced generations, films that invoke anger, sadness, joy, books that literally changed the way that the world thought ...

Can't do music or films, because part of the intent is that the disc be self-contained - no players, viewers, or technology required. Which whittles it down to books and hey - it's the freakin' Bible! It's got all of those and a whole lot more. It IS the Rosetta Stone for most of the great Western works and our history. It's the literary work that is also an adjective, by sheer force of its ubiquity. It's been used, abused, translated, interpreted, distilled, reworked and spun off countless times and ways. Including translation into Klingon, picture books, and God's Little Princess Devotional Bible. It's at the cultural core of the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet today. I can't think of a better choice for Rosetta Stone material.

And it's not because the other religions have more or fewer followers, it's not because they're less important spiritually - it's because the Bible, by truth or by falsehood has touched so much including the histories and contexts of the other religions. I think that at the end of it all, the Bible suffuses the most of the other texts and events that may need to be translated and understood.

I'd want to see the other works preserved, surely - but a Rosetta Stone is to be a key in translating and understanding whatever works survive history. Wars will not have been fought over Harry Potter ... however, keep a vigilant watch over the fuckers waving the mouse banner. I don't trust them beady eyed varmints.

More like one of my favorite books "The World Inside".
http://www.amazon.com/World-Inside-Robert-Silverberg/dp/0385036213

http://www.amazon.com/Original-Road-Kill-Cookbook/dp/0898152003/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219733232&sr=8-3

His crime was really using another's work as the cornerstone for his own product.

They can't even claim that much. It's not his product. It's something that was made in China, that he's reselling. You can get them on Amazon for crying out loud. But, as others have pointed out, this guy is an easy target.

Philip K. Dick?

The back cover of his book.

I don't remember much else about this book, but the idea of a giant city-building stands out.

_Oath of Fealty_, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

http://www.amazon.com/Oath-Fealty-Larry-Niven/dp/0671532278

Or try William C Codington's "American Blue Blood", which can be read as a tale about the precursor to preppies

http://www.amazon.com/American-Blue-Blood-Challenge-Upper-Class/dp/0595316115/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=IAHXEN9IGD0PX&colid=14WEO29LZJ82B

Whit Stillman has thus far dedicated most of his work to the preppie class, both in school and afterwards. There's his original writing

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Disco-Cocktails-Petrossian-Afterwards/dp/0374183392/ref=pd_sim_b_1

or his movies, with Metropolitan coming first and being about the preppies - who rename themselves as U.H.B. - and Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco about their twenties.

http://www.amazon.com/Metropolitan-Criterion-Collection-Carolyn-Farina/dp/B000C8Q9KK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1219694038&sr=8-1

The production values on Metropolitan are lacking, but the script and some of the acting - especially from Chris Eigeman - is great. It's definitely my favorite, although I wish The Last Days Of Disco would be rereleased on DVD.

Or try William C Codington's "American Blue Blood", which can be read as a tale about the precursor to preppies

http://www.amazon.com/American-Blue-Blood-Challenge-Upper-Class/dp/0595316115/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=IAHXEN9IGD0PX&colid=14WEO29LZJ82B

Whit Stillman has thus far dedicated most of his work to the preppie class, both in school and afterwards. There's his original writing

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Disco-Cocktails-Petrossian-Afterwards/dp/0374183392/ref=pd_sim_b_1

or his movies, with Metropolitan coming first and being about the preppies - who rename themselves as U.H.B. - and Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco about their twenties.

http://www.amazon.com/Metropolitan-Criterion-Collection-Carolyn-Farina/dp/B000C8Q9KK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1219694038&sr=8-1

The production values on Metropolitan are lacking, but the script and some of the acting - especially from Chris Eigeman - is great. It's definitely my favorite, although I wish The Last Days Of Disco would be rereleased on DVD.

Or try William C Codington's "American Blue Blood", which can be read as a tale about the precursor to preppies

http://www.amazon.com/American-Blue-Blood-Challenge-Upper-Class/dp/0595316115/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=IAHXEN9IGD0PX&colid=14WEO29LZJ82B

Whit Stillman has thus far dedicated most of his work to the preppie class, both in school and afterwards. There's his original writing

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Disco-Cocktails-Petrossian-Afterwards/dp/0374183392/ref=pd_sim_b_1

or his movies, with Metropolitan coming first and being about the preppies - who rename themselves as U.H.B. - and Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco about their twenties.

http://www.amazon.com/Metropolitan-Criterion-Collection-Carolyn-Farina/dp/B000C8Q9KK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1219694038&sr=8-1

The production values on Metropolitan are lacking, but the script and some of the acting - especially from Chris Eigeman - is great. It's definitely my favorite, although I wish The Last Days Of Disco would be rereleased on DVD.

...check out Robert Bingham's short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value,

http://www.amazon.com/Pure-Slaughter-Value-Robert-Bingham/dp/038548867X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219692771&sr=8-1

or his novel, Lightning on the Sun

http://www.amazon.com/Pure-Slaughter-Value-Robert-Bingham/dp/038548867X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219692771&sr=8-1.

He was from that world, and knew what he was talking about.

...check out Robert Bingham's short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value,

http://www.amazon.com/Pure-Slaughter-Value-Robert-Bingham/dp/038548867X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219692771&sr=8-1

or his novel, Lightning on the Sun

http://www.amazon.com/Pure-Slaughter-Value-Robert-Bingham/dp/038548867X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219692771&sr=8-1.

He was from that world, and knew what he was talking about.

...but yes, the review did crack me up! I actually followed this up with a search on Amazon, and reading their excerpt, it confirmed how abjectly terrible this book must be. Strangely enough, four out of six billion people found this book entertaining and worthy of five stars, which puzzles me to no end. This is more like a blog that became a book, and makes me wary of trying to publish such a thing myself. I suppose that's a good thing though, for my sake. If his pedantic and repetitive prose (just from the excerpt at least) doesn't convince you to stay away, his idiotic fucking face on the front and back covers should say it all, heh.

This one should do the trick: http://www.amazon.com/Orange-Boohbah-Dancing-Zing-Zingbah/dp/B000297PN4/sr=8-3/qid=1158795616/ref=pd_bbs_3/002-0128341-5252830?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games

When I went to high school (early 80s), preppies were the kids who were taking college prep classes - hence "preppie"...Yeah, there were some rich kids who had the nice cars and coasted through life, but they were the rich kids and weren't part of the preppie crowd. They were the ones who got in Ivy League schools because they were legacies or what ever.

"Preppie" comes from "prep school", not "college prep classes" and the usage in your high school had nothing to do with the usual meaning of the term. Your community was probably so unfamiliar with real preppies that the word was repurposed for someone completely different.

"they used to contain basically the address and perhaps logs from calls they made to the call center. Now whole phone conversations are logged as well as faxes and letters that are scanned, together with images and video that is available."

Reminds me of David brin's Transparent society

http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html

http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between-Privacy/dp/0738201448/

At the time of writing, this book has a 5 star rating at Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Recovering-Preppie-Michael-Mare/dp/1419663275

That 'toy' (which I regretfully bought for my son) made me vow to never buy anything without an actual off button built in (i.e. not using a hammer). The one we have will still go off when it's off the stand. I think the designer of that toy actually hates parents. As for the method of your revenge, if you don't want to give them the same type of toy back I can 'recommend' the 'Learn to Dress Elmo' (link). Revenge served cold.

Well, if you're actually that interested -- hey, go straight to the source!

http://www.amazon.com/Chilling-Stars-Theory-Climate-Change/dp/1840468157

And we are back to something that can explain modulations on the trend, but not (as Svensmark claims) the trend itself.

What always makes me wonder about these crimes... what did he think was going to happen?

He probably thought that nothing would happen. I mean, when the exact same device is being sold on many websites, he probably thought of himself as something of a retailer. Yea, he probably should have gotten a retailer license, but to charge him with copyright infringement? Maybe we should go after Jeff Bezos, since the exact same device is on Amazon.com...What was Bezos thinking?

Get yours now! http://www.amazon.com/Super-Power-Player-Joystick-Game/dp/B000AXWEVU

I'll be Jeff Bezos won't be going to jail any time soon.

Well, if you're actually that interested -- hey, go straight to the source!

http://www.amazon.com/Chilling-Stars-Theory-Climate-Change/dp/1840468157

Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell's 1984 should be required reading in our schools.

Don't forget Yevgeny Zamyatin's We

a far greater security threat than a bug in an application

Wouldn't dispute that a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.
The reason for the mess with SSNs is that the Federal government under FDR was as safe as Dick Cheney with a loaded firearm:
http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Man-History-Great-Depression/dp/0060936428/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219261467&sr=8-1

Spot on, but I would take it a bit further. Good AI at both the individual and group NPC levels is the key to the content problem - without it, nobody can script or generate persistent, non-linear, per-NPC story-lines fast enough to meet a large user base.

From a designer's perspective, you only need to initialize NPCs to a set of stats and relationships with each other (like, dislike, do not know, would avenge, reminds me of, ...), and a long list of (possibly randomized) behaviors (aggressive against aggressors, 'work' behavior, fight-or-flight, crowd-forming, gossip). When something happens, designers can let the NPCs work it out by themselves, or nudge them along a general direction ("villagers send out a scout to the next village requesting help", "leave town", "form a mob and try to defend town"). Designers become something like the agents in 'matrix' - their preferred mode of interaction is to take over control of NPCs temporarily to make them advance certain plots.

Even better - this can work for larger groups of NPCs, allowing entire communities to develop community relationships. Create an unpopulated world, and drop a number of 'seed communities' (with community-wide likes, dislikes, goals, and so on). Simulate their evolution for a while; let them fight or cooperate with each other, build an economy, watch as some spread and others drop back, tinker to produced desired master storyline arcs (but let details sort themselves out) -- and *then* drop in the PCs. Simplified models can work just great - see the examples in Phillip Ball's book. Or take some clues from biologists or economists - they've been modeling entire ecosystems (economists call them 'markets') for a while.

A nice after-effect of 'evolved' NPCs and NPC communities is that they would provide rich backgrounds for PCs. So you want to be a rogue? Great, pick among these rogue-like characters we've been evolving in the last year (you may know some of them 'cause they tried to rob you before when you played another PC), and you will get a background, a set of likes and dislikes, a couple of caring aunts and uncles you can help or flee from, and so on and so forth. Also, this would provide persistence during off-line hours - let PCs choose the goals that will drive their characters while they're not directly controlling them.

Good communication can help struggling economies a lot.

I think we often see these things as a modern luxury and forget the actual utility they can provide.

I remember an example given by Muhammad Yunus in Banker to the Poor where a woman used to waste a day walking to the next village to pick up some raw materials, only to find out when she got there that they weren't ready yet. A whole days productivity wasted because she had no way of knowing without actually going to check. A cell phone (shared by the village) changed that.

Check out the color revolution, which was non-violent and successful at overthrowing corrupt and/or authoritarian governments.

Funny you should mention that. I came across a book which insists that Obama is doing just that, in an attempt to conduct a "fascist coup."

Obama - The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate Of course, it's by Webster Tarpley, conspiracy-theorist-extraordinaire, so it should be taken with an appropriate dose of salt.

It'd actually be an interesting read if it weren't written in such a mushy-headed, stream-of-consciousness manner.

If they get thrown in jail, then can dig the implants out of their arms, and use them to make a primitive laser to cut open the lock.

Of course, it takes 2 implants, and a piece of an old bedframe....

And also this full season McGyver DVD set.

For what it's worth, Gene Wolfe didn't make up any of the weird words in The Book of the New Sun. Instead, he trawled through the Oxford English Dictionary and wove his text out of authentic English lexical items that for some reason or another fell out of use. If you are interested, there's an essay entitled, IIRC, "Words Weird and Wonderful" in Wolfe's collection Castle of Days/cite, which has plenty of other interesting tidbits about the writing of that science fiction masterpiece.

Stephenson is hardly the first SF writer to use esoteric language styles for effect.

Stephenson is hardly the first SF writer to use esoteric language styles for effect.

Stephenson is hardly the first SF writer to use esoteric language styles for effect.

Amazon has a 12-page preview and a short video segment with Neal Stephenson here

it a bit harder to manage.

Broken English aside, I'm not convinced that it's harder to manage than an old COBOL codebase.

More importantly, mainframes are hard to design and build. Once someone's properly designed and built a cluster as a software package, it's not significantly harder than a mainframe -- perhaps easier, as you can always let someone else manage the hardware.

As if there were any competition to be unfair to...

Yeah, if only there were other VOD providers.

z/OS is an upgrade of OS390, but yes - it has something called UNIX System Services, which is POSIX compliant but not as friendly as LINUX.

It's not that z/OS fights changes, exactly. Windows is crufty because it has to run MS-DOS programs from the eighties. z/OS has to run programs from the sixties, and do it with a high degree of reliability.

Disclosure: I am an IBM employee and the author of a mainframe book.

How about we apply some dispassionate brainpower to tidy up a few messes?
For a really good read, see:
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Penguin-Press-Science-Diamond/dp/0140279512/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219365127&sr=8-1

If you want a more literal outsourcing of playing jazz parts to India, don't forget this excellent Miles Davis inspired CD compilation.

Well... I was gonna ask you if you have any idea what "equivalent" means, but after rereading your post I realized that in your universe this looks exactly like this.

Say what... Why don't YOU go and gather the statistics regarding iPod nano (4 and 8 GB) and Zunes 4 and 8 from... a what the hell, lets make it simple... from Amazon.
When you get back with those we can continue to ask questions about our respective logic and intelligence.

Naturally, all of the above does not in any way reduce the validity of a simple fact that cheap outsells cool. All the time.

Well... I was gonna ask you if you have any idea what "equivalent" means, but after rereading your post I realized that in your universe this looks exactly like this.

Say what... Why don't YOU go and gather the statistics regarding iPod nano (4 and 8 GB) and Zunes 4 and 8 from... a what the hell, lets make it simple... from Amazon.
When you get back with those we can continue to ask questions about our respective logic and intelligence.

Naturally, all of the above does not in any way reduce the validity of a simple fact that cheap outsells cool. All the time.

Shock absorbers now? This sounds more and more like the original project Orion every time I hear about it.

New O'Reily book: "Python for Unix and Linux System Administration" should be out September 2, 2008.

http://www.amazon.com/Python-Unix-Linux-System-Administration/dp/0596515820/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219235379&sr=8-1

Just thought I'd mention it.

Warriner's English Grammar

The book is not Hitman, it is Hit Man, available only on the used market: http://www.amazon.com/Hit-Man-Technical-Independent-Contractors/dp/0873642767/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219202282&sr=1-6