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One thing that hasn't quickly shown itself as outdated, however, and which isn't so easily accessible from Google as coding references, is web design in general. I recently picked up The Zen of CSS Design and am amazed at what beautiful and usable layouts are possible with standard CSS. There's plenty of resources on how to write up a file full of CSS style rules, and too few resources that tell you how to create a site people will really want to look at.

Citation needed.

Here

Not everybody who reads your comment will be prepared to buy and read the entire book just to reply. Page number please, and preferably a quotation under fair use if you can.

Well, lets try page 24: "And if he doesn't know who sent the message, then the message is pretty useless."

Citation needed.

Here

Not everybody who reads your comment will be prepared to buy and read the entire book just to reply. Page number please, and preferably a quotation under fair use if you can.

HTTPS with a self-signed certificate is vulnerable only to man-in-the-middle attacks, which are more difficult than sniffing.

Harder does not equal more secure, just more work for the attacker.

Exactly. If your site uses self-signed HTTPS, it is less likely to get hit than someone else's site that uses plain HTTP. It's called not being the low-hanging fruit. The problem here isn't that self-signed HTTPS has a warning but that plain HTTP has no warning.

Once he has your credit card details

Of course you wouldn't put payment on a self-signed site. Third-party payment processors such as PayPal and Google Checkout have EV SSL certificates for that. Public self-signed HTTPS is more about keeping people from stealing passwords on a non-commercial forum or wiki.

Citation needed.

Here

HTTPS with a self-signed certificate is vulnerable only to man-in-the-middle attacks, which are more difficult than sniffing.

Harder does not equal more secure, just more work for the attacker. Once he has your credit card details, you do not really care how hard it was to get.

If you knew that going in, then your trip to the library would pretty much be "consent" wouldn't it?

I mean if FBI agent X can seize records a Y, then knowingly going to Y means you allowed it. All through school, I was told that the FBI has watch lists for people who checked out certain books. We actually attempted to figure out which ones they were and get everyone in the school to check it out. Almost every 1st grader joined in with the rest of us an had carried a copy of mein kampf and 1984. Our plan to over work the government didn't have a much support in junior high and highschool because a couple of us got busted with copies of Kitchen improvised plastic explosives and Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects in school. Five of us got 10 days out of school suspension and one guy got 15 days in school suspension over them. This was also well before Columbine, back in the early to mid 80's.

If you knew that going in, then your trip to the library would pretty much be "consent" wouldn't it?

I mean if FBI agent X can seize records a Y, then knowingly going to Y means you allowed it. All through school, I was told that the FBI has watch lists for people who checked out certain books. We actually attempted to figure out which ones they were and get everyone in the school to check it out. Almost every 1st grader joined in with the rest of us an had carried a copy of mein kampf and 1984. Our plan to over work the government didn't have a much support in junior high and highschool because a couple of us got busted with copies of Kitchen improvised plastic explosives and Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects in school. Five of us got 10 days out of school suspension and one guy got 15 days in school suspension over them. This was also well before Columbine, back in the early to mid 80's.

If you keep your backups for one month, S3 costs about $300 per TB. That's not a bad price for offsite backup that's easily accessible from both your main and disaster recovery servers.
price list

That second link should be http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-1

The mother of all ESP textbooks.

"Turns out, the government really did have a Stargate Project [wikipedia.org] -- it was just about psychics, not aliens. And they didn't find any. Of either."

Actually they did. You might want to read Mind-Reach, the 1977 original book about SCANATE, the SRI project that later became GRILL FLAME then was closed (at least officially) by the CIA under the name STAR GATE. Some of their 'hits' detailed in this book are pretty darn impressive.

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Reach-Scientists-Psychic-Abilities-Consciousness/dp/1571744142/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217800041&sr=8-1

The tricky thing about remote viewing is not that it doesn't work, but that it's hard to separate the 'signal' from the 'noise'.

And of course, the results are incompatible with assumptions made by some of our fundamental physical theories. Whatever information channel ESP uses, it does not appear to obey the inverse square law or respect light cones, so it's not EM-based. This makes it difficult to figure out how to maximise the effect, since we don't have a good mathematical model for how it works. Some scientists (or science-believing people, as opposed to active researchers) are uncomfortable with admitting this kind of uncertainty into their personal models of the universe. It's a lot easier to believe that we really do understand how the universe works than to realise that actually, we only understand parts of it and our working assumptions may need to be rethought.

But when you get significant results that contradict theory, it's the theory that should change, if you're doing science.

See also http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3

and http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3

for some very recent books detailing the experimental support for the reality of ESP.

"Turns out, the government really did have a Stargate Project [wikipedia.org] -- it was just about psychics, not aliens. And they didn't find any. Of either."

Actually they did. You might want to read Mind-Reach, the 1977 original book about SCANATE, the SRI project that later became GRILL FLAME then was closed (at least officially) by the CIA under the name STAR GATE. Some of their 'hits' detailed in this book are pretty darn impressive.

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Reach-Scientists-Psychic-Abilities-Consciousness/dp/1571744142/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217800041&sr=8-1

The tricky thing about remote viewing is not that it doesn't work, but that it's hard to separate the 'signal' from the 'noise'.

And of course, the results are incompatible with assumptions made by some of our fundamental physical theories. Whatever information channel ESP uses, it does not appear to obey the inverse square law or respect light cones, so it's not EM-based. This makes it difficult to figure out how to maximise the effect, since we don't have a good mathematical model for how it works. Some scientists (or science-believing people, as opposed to active researchers) are uncomfortable with admitting this kind of uncertainty into their personal models of the universe. It's a lot easier to believe that we really do understand how the universe works than to realise that actually, we only understand parts of it and our working assumptions may need to be rethought.

But when you get significant results that contradict theory, it's the theory that should change, if you're doing science.

See also http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3

and http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3

for some very recent books detailing the experimental support for the reality of ESP.

"Turns out, the government really did have a Stargate Project [wikipedia.org] -- it was just about psychics, not aliens. And they didn't find any. Of either."

Actually they did. You might want to read Mind-Reach, the 1977 original book about SCANATE, the SRI project that later became GRILL FLAME then was closed (at least officially) by the CIA under the name STAR GATE. Some of their 'hits' detailed in this book are pretty darn impressive.

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Reach-Scientists-Psychic-Abilities-Consciousness/dp/1571744142/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217800041&sr=8-1

The tricky thing about remote viewing is not that it doesn't work, but that it's hard to separate the 'signal' from the 'noise'.

And of course, the results are incompatible with assumptions made by some of our fundamental physical theories. Whatever information channel ESP uses, it does not appear to obey the inverse square law or respect light cones, so it's not EM-based. This makes it difficult to figure out how to maximise the effect, since we don't have a good mathematical model for how it works. Some scientists (or science-believing people, as opposed to active researchers) are uncomfortable with admitting this kind of uncertainty into their personal models of the universe. It's a lot easier to believe that we really do understand how the universe works than to realise that actually, we only understand parts of it and our working assumptions may need to be rethought.

But when you get significant results that contradict theory, it's the theory that should change, if you're doing science.

See also http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3

and http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3

for some very recent books detailing the experimental support for the reality of ESP.

There are still the issues of acceptance, and support.

Consider Quickbooks for example, even if there were a f/oss equivalent that was just as good, or better:

* No significant cost advantage: QuickBooks simple start is free:
http://quickbooks.intuit.com/product/accounting-software/free-accounting-software.jhtml
Or I can buy the full version of QuickBooks Pro 2008 in only $145:
http://www.amazon.com/Intuit-403697-QuickBooks-Pro-2008/dp/B000V4PLWM/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1217794735&sr=8-1
Seems to me that any cost advantage of using a foss alternative is negligible..

* Wide acceptance: I think most businesses are much more comfortable using products that are accepted standards.

* Wealth of available add-ons: Intuit has a very active community of 3rd party developers. You can buy practically any kind of an add-on you can imagine. These add-ons cost money, but at least they are available.

* Major company: I think a lot of businesses are not comfortable with a product unless there is a major company behind that product. I have to admit, even I am not comfortable with software products that are essentially one man operations.

* Support: I can always hire somebody who knows quickbooks, or find a "ProAdvisor" consultant, or I can get support from the company, and there are hundreds - if not thousands - of developers who specialize in developing for quickbooks. I can not see where that is true for any project.

* Training availability and costs. I can hire people who already know quickbooks. If I hire somebody to work on some foss alternative, then there will be a significant training expense. Of course, there is also the issue of training availability.

* Documentation: If I had to pick one thing that kills the usefulness of more foss projects than anything else, this would win in a slam-dunk. Of course, this varies among projects, some foss projects have great documentation. But, I can always find plenty of books, or other documentation for popular proprietary financial apps.

* Many accountants, maybe as many as 200,000, use QB and recommend it to their clients. Some accountants will charge much more for files that are not in QB format.

* QB has much better 3rd party integration. For example, ecommerce packages like oscommerce, and magento, work with quickbooks, not foss alternatives. Msft accounting works with ebay. I can not find that sort of integration with foss software.

>Being able to read the Japanese and German codes was a decisive advantage in winning WWII

Decisive? In the sense that without it the war would be lost? Hardly. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany are made more formidable than they actually were, in the wave of pride that came after the allies defeated them. They were heroic, as were the allies. But it was never an equal match of forces once both the US and the USSR were on the side of the allies.

I recommend reading "The Prize",by Pulitzer Prize winning author Daniel Yergin, in order to have an economic perspective on WWII. You will see how once the oil embargo was placed on Japan, and once Germany decided to break its alliance with the Soviets (thereby cutting its supply of Oil) the outcome of the war was pretty much decided. Essentially once that happened both Japan and Germany had a ticking clock to run against: their dimnishing stock of oil. That made it necessary for both to be very audacious, taking great risks and placing all their hopes in a few bold moves. Pearl Harbour for the Japanese, the drive towards the heart of Russia for the German.

These two bets didn't pay off, and from then on they were essentially on the defensive, trying to make do with very limited amounts of oil.

Apple does with Mobile Me. Amazon has a product called "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud". Now THERE'S a stupid name!

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

I'm surprised none of the stories about this mention how easy it is to VPN out of China and thus bypass any blocks they throw up.

The problem is that ordinary citizens in China doesn't know what happen on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Do you seriously expect the average Chinese citizen to be able to get VPN out og China, and risk his/her life/career on it because the sites are illegal.

The ordinary citizens in China (at least those over 20) know quite well what happened on Tiananmen in 1989,just talk to any Chinese cab driver.

Most Chinese don't think it has much relevance to today's business. While they agree the government in 1989 committed horrible crimes, hell it is two decades ago and both China and Chinese government has changed a lot. Most of Chinese are happy with the current government.

As for Tiananmen square most think it will resolve over time . Even a lot of 1989 demostrators support the Chinese government.Here is an interesting interview.

Here I quote the most relevent part

" Q. But what Deng achieved - could he not have done it within a more democratic system? Did there have to be the ruthlessness?

After going to the US for five or six years, I saw that the level of democracy there can only happen in a society with a certain level of education. What the people of China now need is leadership. China is one century behind the US, and you canâ(TM)t expect us to change that fast.

This is why many Asians resent it when Americans try to insist that the Chinese adopt their style of democracy. Shanghai may be ready, but if you go out to the surrounding areas, youâ(TM)ll see it just isnâ(TM)t possible, that it will take more time. I believe that one day, China will have Taiwan-style democracy, but it has to be built on a strong economy.

Q. I agree that Western-style democracy isnâ(TM)t right for China today. But canâ(TM)t there be a compromise? Canâ(TM)t the government be strong, without tolerating abuse of the poor by corrupt officials, without tolerating the marginalization of AIDS victims, without arresting kids who write about government reform on the Internet?

The way we view human rights is so different from the Westâ(TM)s. We have 1.3 billion people and many of them go hungry. Putting food on the table and a roof over its peopleâ(TM)s heads is what our government has to worry about. AIDS, corruption, the Internet - that is all secondary to the leadership of 1.3 billion people. If I were running China today, I would not be able to hear all the different parties. I would have to have my own agenda and stick to that agenda. I believe that if a secret vote were held today most people in China would vote for the CCP.

For more than 150 years, starting with the Opium Wars, our national pride has been bullied by the Europeans, the Russians, then the Japanese. Now China is an economic and a military power. And it has no intentions of being aggressive. So I am not giving up my Chinese citizenship. Ten years ago I would have jumped to do that.

Looking back, I firmly believe the government did the right thing, though they could have handled it better. We paid a high price. Our leaders in 1989 could have shown greater human skills and greater negotiating skills. But letâ(TM)s live with Communism for now and change things one thing at a time. The Chinese now have a much better life than they did 100 years ago. Not so long ago, my house was the first in our hutong to have a television set. The whole neighborhood would come to our backyard and sit on the ground to watch. It was just a 9-inch TV, and we put a la

Read C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet for one take on "the perpetuation of life."

Have you read The Long Tail? (Or the Book)

you get this Jennifer Government by Max Berry

4. Not figuring out for years how to make money off of music the old fashioned way- by earning it through new ways of distribution, not by suing people.

There is no revenue in recorded music anymore. I know I'm not buying any, and nobody I know is buying any.

Just because you don't buy music doesn't mean others don't. Currently I don't, the last CD I bought I did about 4 years ago, but except when I drive I don't listen to music much anymore. And all I have in my car is a radio, there's no tape, CD, or mpg player. However I want to get a turntable, then I would buy vinyl records. In the past few years I've seen more and more stores selling turntables. Even Best Buy carry them, and they may start carrying the records too. Amazon already carries them. I'm still looking for a good one that plays 78rpm as well as 33s and 45s, all I've seen so far don't play 78s. Though only a small part of the market, vinyl record sales are increasing.

Falcon

• Are you worried about insiders stealing customer data?
• Or outsiders hacking in from the InterWeb?
• Or a nutter changing your admin passwords and blackmailing you?
• Or someone in the next office logging your network traffic?

Start with "Security Engineering" by Ross Anderson. The first edition is online.

We have -- that doesn't mean that it's true. There's a good argument that petroleum was actually formed with the planet and in fact has leached upwards. http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Hot-Biosphere-Thomas-Gold/dp/0387985468

You are apparently talking about black-box testing. For starters, you need a security team to perform penetration testing on the apps in a production-like environment. But if you have home-grown software, you need to address the problem of insecure systems being built by your programmers. The programmers need to understand application security. For a somewhat theoretical but still practical treatment, I recommend my own book, High-Assurance Design (Addison-Wesley, 2005). You should also check out Michael Howard's book and his blog. And then there are Gary McGraw's books which address process. - Cliff

Chalkboard or Whiteboard?

I mean really -- is Edward Tufte fighting a losing battle with his Criticism of PowerPoint, and we're already seeing people incapable of thinking outside of bullet points?

I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.

Chances are it ends up like one of dozens upon dozens of cases out there, well publicized in the media, of cops abusing the hell out of people who record their actions. Doubly likely now since you're their target (unlike in most cases with camera-related incidents), and are acting in a f#$% you way toward them.

I've thought about buying one of these AIPTek camcorders. The things aren't half bad and would be ridiculously easy to carry around in public in case you ever had a good video opportunity.

Err...yes, because Amazon's last auction site worked so well. Have you noticed that eBay is becoming more like Amazon? Payments to go through eBay's payment processor (PayPal). Greater concentration on fixed price (Buy It Now). Seller based browsing. Amazon had all those things first.

Amazon already competes with eBay in online selling. Do they really need a variable price mechanism as well? It's one of those areas that scales naturally to a monopoly. Sellers want to run single auctions that maximize the buyers (more potential buyers means a higher top bid).

Auctions is actually a niche market. It works best for unique objects, where the seller does not know how much a buyer is willing to pay. One of the challenges for eBay in recent years is that many of the people who have used auctions would really prefer a fixed price setting but have had to use auctions because that was the only place they could find their product.

In far more countries than Amazon and selling through both auctions and fixed price, eBay's earnings are still lower than Amazon. Amazon would be better off launching in a new country (e.g. India or Australia) rather than trying to invade the auction market.

The reason for Checkout By Amazon is simple. Amazon is moving to a model where people can pick and choose what Amazon services to use in selling their product. There's the Amazon Advantage program, where the product is in Amazon's warehouse, discoverable on Amazon's site, paid for through Amazon's checkout system, and shipped by Amazon (possibly bundled with other items). However, if people prefer, they can purchase those services separately:

1. Store in Amazon's warehouse and ship with Amazon's discounts.

2. Discovery through Amazon's sites (if they don't use Amazon's checkout, they can't have a detail page but can still purchase a link from Amazon to their site that appears in search results and on other detail pages).

3. Pay through Amazon's payment processor. Amazon already had Simple Pay. It used to be called the Honor System. Checkout by Amazon is new only in that one couldn't use it separately previously but had to list the item on Amazon's site.

Amazon is also different from eBay in that it offers listing on defined pages where all listings of a certain product are on the same page. This is the reverse of the auctions model, where every listing is essentially its own product. Discovery is expensive and hard. Payment is straight forward by comparison. As such, if you want to see an eBay competitor, you should look for a company that is competitive in search rather than in payment. Amazon currently does not have that kind of search, and it would be expensive for them to develop it (with no guarantee of success, see A9, where years of development failed to produce results).

Instead of linking to an uninteresting web page with very few details, TFA should link to the webpage describing the service on Amazon :
http://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Payments-Service-AWS/b/ref=sc_fe_l_3?ie=UTF8&node=342430011&no=3440661&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA

It's much more interesting that what I expected from TFA, it seems to actually be even more flexible and configurable than PayPal :

Examples of possible Payment Instructions include:

        * Transaction Amount: Specify fixed minimum, maximum, range, or specific amount for a certain payment.
        * Transaction Date: Configure a payment transaction to be executed at a specific time (e.g. specific day, weekly, monthly, or date range).
        * Spending Limit: Set daily, weekly or monthly limits on number of transactions or total amount spent, to control spending on your application.
        * Recipient List: Specify recipients who are authorized to access and receive funds.
        * Payment Method: Specify the payment methods (credit card, bank account debit, balance transfer) you want to accept through your application.
        * Fees: Control which party pays the Amazon FPS charges.

Niiice!
Take that PayPal!

"Checkout by Amazon is currently available only for sellers in the United States." https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=cba/faq#o_countries

Well, if Never A Straight Answer (NASA) would just be open and *gasp* honest, for a change, maybe they wouldn't be ridiculed.

If you know what selects for intelligence, by all means post it here; I've asked every biology teacher I've had since 9th grade and never gotten a reasonable answer.

doh. the answer is sexual selection. human brain is a giant sexual ornament, same as peacock's tail.

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0060556579/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217423815&sr=8-1

The thread is talking about arrays, and you mention std::list. Right, C++ standard library golden rule #1: always use std::vector, unless you have a really, REALLY, REALLY good reason to use something else. See also one of the other child posts.
std::vector is the array replacement. It has good random access speed. It is guaranteed to use contiguous memory. If it's not fast enough that's probably because you are allocating memory because you are storing by value and the STL makes a lot of copies of stored values internally in many operations(see other child post) - and that can be solved without defaulting to pointers by using a custom allocator.
If any of this seems too complex to you, you shouldn't have been bothering with performance-critical C++ yet, and learning more about the language and libraries first. I recommend the book "Efficient C++" by Dov Bulka and David Mayhew as an introduction, and "Effective STL" by Scott Meyers for more on the standard library.

Except that the article you link to seems to assume that the voting process starts with the ballot. It doesn't, because the ballot may be cast fraudulently. It doesn't stop dead people from voting (see the history of Chicago). It doesn't stop illegal aliens from voting. It doesn't stop college students and Florida snowbirds from voting in two places. It doesn't stop groups like ACORN from registering fictitious voters. It doesn't stop corrupt jurisdictions from just stuffing the ballot box.

I know the topic of electronic vote fraud is a natural for Slashdot, but the discussions tend to focus on technical aspects of potential fraud, and totally ignore the good old-fashioned methods of vote fraud, of which there are many, many documented instances.

I need to wrap up this post so I don't have the references, but there are numerous instances of big cities (like Philadelphia) that have reported more votes than there are voting-age adults living in the city! Sometimes these votes come in oddly late in state-wide and national elections, and are just enough to tip the election.

Except that the article you link to seems to assume that the voting process starts with the ballot. It doesn't, because the ballot may be cast fraudulently. It doesn't stop dead people from voting (see the history of Chicago). It doesn't stop illegal aliens from voting. It doesn't stop college students and Florida snowbirds from voting in two places. It doesn't stop groups like ACORN from registering fictitious voters. It doesn't stop corrupt jurisdictions from just stuffing the ballot box.

I know the topic of electronic vote fraud is a natural for Slashdot, but the discussions tend to focus on technical aspects of potential fraud, and totally ignore the good old-fashioned methods of vote fraud, of which there are many, many documented instances.

I need to wrap up this post so I don't have the references, but there are numerous instances of big cities (like Philadelphia) that have reported more votes than there are voting-age adults living in the city! Sometimes these votes come in oddly late in state-wide and national elections, and are just enough to tip the election.

Hey Champ.. I am currently studying Software Development in Denmark. We have a teacher involved in the field of UI design. He has written a book, which i believe can help you a greate deal. It has concrete methods of measuring and testing the usability factor of UI's. The book is called "User Interface Design", Soren Lauesen. Chech it out: http://www.amazon.com/User-Interface-Design-Engineering-Perspective/dp/0321181433/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217368487&sr=8-2

Spend the $100 get the book set...

http://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Companions-Third-Revised-Boxed/dp/0321514432/

Heck, we mathies ought to count our lucky stars that Knuth ever took the time to design TeX in the first place

And we compies are crying our hearts out that he never got to finish his promised Art of computer programming. Where are my volumes 4 to 8 ?!? Get cracking. Now !!!

It is used entirely appropriately.

Check Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style".

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk/dp/020530902X

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

...LaTeX is still the first choice. It is more robust, and gives the user more control over appearance, than anything else I've seen. Kinda like the original post says, if it's not relevant anymore, what's the alternative?

Polyurethane. A little more expensive, but thinner and hypo-allergenic.

Here you go. And for only $19.95!

Wow. Here we have proof that facism springs from the left side of the political spectrum.

Historically, most fascism has come from the Left. Who is it who's more often trying to micromanage your life--telling you what to drive, what to eat, where and how to live, what to think, etc.?

Efforts such as these give the impression the advances in spaceflight will gravitate towards commercial companies catering to consumers

In his novel Firestar , the first volume of a future history attempting to be a realistic vision of the rise of human spaceflight, Michael Flynn had FedEx as one a major sponsor of private launches. Being able to deliver a package anywhere on Earth in 90 minutes, Flynn thought, would be an incredible advantage to a courier firm. With the rise of the Internet, however, there are ever fewer physical packages to be transported, and maybe no company would be willing to pay thousands extra for just a few hours less of delivery time. Now, except for space tourism, I'm hard-pressed to find any commercial use for mere orbital flights (as opposed to getting out there and mining).

Mothstorm: The Horror Beyond //Uranus// Georgium Sidus /i?

Consciousness? Is that part of physics now? Do try to follow the thread: it might aid your understanding.

Some people seem to think so...

Still, other people think it's new age hokum.

Consciousness? Is that part of physics now? Do try to follow the thread: it might aid your understanding.

Some people seem to think so...

Still, other people think it's new age hokum.

All that stuff has been easily learned by anyone with the ability to READ for a long time now. What's the big deal?

Now some lazy ass can sit on his couch and be entertained by the THOUGHT of actually hacking on something by some folks on the pretty flashy LCD panel across the room.

Wanna hack? Build a workbench, turn the TV off, and grab a good book.

Again, the claim that CD software is always going to decode the data flawlessly is yet to be proven.

No, it has to be disproven. And in this case, it has to be disproven for the vast majority of models, since apparently only the very best players can properly decode an audio CD, as per the post.

It should, but again some makers would cheat as much as possible on the processor, RAM, whatever to get the unit out the door for a profit.

Read the CD specs some time. RAM is not much of a concern, neither is the processor -- if you want to get ANYTHING out of the signal, AT ALL. You can use a shoddy laser, but that's not just gonna be shoddy on some "hard to decode" sequences of audio, but everywhere. It'll also result in audible skipping. Another thing I have seen is an improperly shock-isolated drive, i.e. one that would starts skipping at even slight vibrations -- like those caused by a drumbeat as rendered by the speakers. But again, that is not decoding logic.

What the hell are you gonna cheat on, on CDs ? Really, what ? Look at the specs, there is not much to cheat on to make it fail on just some "very hard" sequences ... There is nothing "really hard" or "really easy", it is the exact same difficulty.

This is MUCH less common nowadays, since the hardware is pretty cheap, and processors are vastly better than back in the late 80s. My first player was a Sony, and it was fine. The next, a Denon, was not my friend, though most of the problems were with the UI.

Denon of http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM/ fame ? No wonder. Oh, and shoddy UIs say nothing about the decoding logic.

I'm going to have to look harder for the problem passages I worked with back around 1992. We were discussing it on minidisc.org, but I can't find the emails yet. Another archive I have to get and load.

As I noted, you ARE gonna find problematic passages on Minidiscs. MD is not CD. MD is lossily compressed with a bad, bad codec; though I assume you know that and mean something else.

Yes, I have emails from 1990 and before.

As do I. Also lots of FidoNet stuff.

Don't ask. I have spam samples from then to about 2004, when spam stopped being cool and started being nasty.

That late, eh ? :)

The only DIFFERENCES to observe in CD players are in laser/lense quality, drive/tray durability, and error correction. That last one is interesting on scratched and some burned discs; earlier models, in particular, would play improperly "corrected" samples in their garbled form, which would cause some nasty noise (about the effect you get when you play a CD-ROM in a very old audio CD player); now those samples are just silently skipped. Some firmwares try to interpolate missing samples, but that's not staying true to the original (kinda like MP3Pro sounding "crisper" than MP3 at low bitrates -- and, as it turns out, the original material). If skipping is the problem, however, it's because the CD has faults, not because the decoding logic has a hard time with some sequences of bits and not others.

Computer Networks by Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Well there is some reading for them.

Already a book. I suppose you could use it as a script.

http://www.amazon.com/Illegal-Aliens-Nick-Pollotta/dp/1933274131/ref=sr_1_1/104-0896581-2510320?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217019633&sr=1-1

Silly. Hilarious.

If you buy an entire album from Amazon, it'll be at an album price. The 0.99 or 0.89 thing is only when buying individual songs.

For example: Maroon 5 Album

Price: $8.99. Songs: 18.

The price of the CD version is $9.99, actually.

Also, perhaps my ear is untrained, but I think 256kbps is pretty darn good quality. Maybe my standards are just too low, but it's good enough for me. (Then, I've never had the luxury of a 7.1 sound system).