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They settled for something very similar to George Bush's strategy of "Pre-emptive Attack" and attacked a naval base on an island in an illegally stolen territory within the American Regional Empire. Their strike was an obvious contingency, so the valuable ships (spanky new aircraft carriers) were all sent out to sea, leaving behind (mostly) relatively older battleships and cruisers.

For more facts on this, I would recommend Daniel Yergin's "The Prize".

You are not insightful. You are more of an ignorant troll.

RS

In David Brin's novel Earth IIRC the Earth's orbit crosses a tiny black hole, which ends up falling into the Earth's core, threatening both the planet and the survival of life on it. What is the real possibility such a thing could occur?

Sobell did a great book on Unix that went through a few editions and that I still keep on my shelf although it is a bit outdated. I'm looking forward to the Ubuntu one.

The book business is very, very lucrative, and don't even get started on school books. Find a weird subject on wikipedia (use the "random" feature), then look it up on Amazon. Chances are there's a book about it, regardless of how irrelevant, simple, or plain stupid the subject is.

I just got a new hobby.

Lateral Consonant: Check
1672 Gezelle: Check
Palala River: Check

The book business is very, very lucrative, and don't even get started on school books. Find a weird subject on wikipedia (use the "random" feature), then look it up on Amazon. Chances are there's a book about it, regardless of how irrelevant, simple, or plain stupid the subject is.

I just got a new hobby.

Lateral Consonant: Check
1672 Gezelle: Check
Palala River: Check

The book business is very, very lucrative, and don't even get started on school books. Find a weird subject on wikipedia (use the "random" feature), then look it up on Amazon. Chances are there's a book about it, regardless of how irrelevant, simple, or plain stupid the subject is.

I just got a new hobby.

Lateral Consonant: Check
1672 Gezelle: Check
Palala River: Check

# Paperback: 1200 pages # Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 1 Pap/Cdr edition (December 28, 2007)

From http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Ubuntu-Linux-R/dp/013236039X considering that Ubuntu 7.10 hasn't been out until October of 2007 and when this was published in December it was only out for 2-3 months, that's still 3 months till Hardy stable comes out. This is just a late review of it.

This phenomenon is explained in E. T. Jaynes' book Probability Theory: the Logic of Science. In it he develops the concept of an ideal plausible reasoner who can use inference. He shows that given a small set of desired traits all such reasoner with those traits conform to the same mathematical model which turns to be pretty much the same thing as Baysian probability theory.

Jaynes goes on to show that when two such ideal reasoners have differing views (due to their different past experiences) and are confronted with the same piece of new evidence, each one can believe the new evidence further reinforces their own view, thus polarizing the two ideal reasoners even further. This is a fundamental yet little known problem facing all human societies.

I think this is exactly what is going on in the fascinating study you brought up. It is nothing new. Even if humans were ideal reasoners (in the sense defined by Jaynes) we would still encounter these problems. Instead of blaming the audience for what is essentially a mathematical reality, it would be much more useful if we educated people about the underlying mathematics that causes this behavior.

Just to back that up, there is for instance this passage from the Penguin edition of Marcellinus's The Later Roman Empire: A.D. 354-378 :

Next the affair of the [unauthorised] royal robe was investigated, and after the workers in purple had been tortured and had admitted the making of a short sleveless tunic, a man named Maras was brought forward.

I knew buying cars with OnStar was going to be bad.

Me, I'm waiting until the day vehicular electronics systems begin randomly acheiving sentience. Will they go on a killing spree a la Stephen King's Christine or will they become your best friend and help you fight crime a la Knightrider? The future is full of creepy car possibilities.

I am myself in favor of a "you only get charged for what you actually get".

Brian Carrier's File System Forensics is a staple book for anyone in forensics.

I think that the majority of others are specialty training guides provided to those in the field, or just basic knowledge gained from experience.

If you really want to learn more, download Sleuthkit/Autopsy (Sleuthkit is cmd line forensics tools, Autopsy is a web-based frontend to them) and just play. They're FOSS, and you'll learn more this way than any other. The tools were also written by Brian Carrier, author of the book above.

I don't know what to think of the news here as I've just started reading Quicksilver. It's been a slow start so far, but it wasn't unpleasant so I'll continue as long as my trust in Neal is strong. What I do question though is my ability to read the 3000 pages or so of the Baroque Cycle while also making progress on Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (which for me appears to progress in real time) before Anathem is out. Oh well, I really enjoyed Cryptonomicon so I'll probably make it through Quicksliver too.

I'm still to finish Cryptonomicon, but my biggest complaint isn't the story. It seems I got the mass market paperback edition, featuring 1168 pages of tiny text and lines crunched into each other. What a mess, it is the most unpleasant thing I tried to read... Did they ever heard of readability? It may be ok for smaller books, 200-400 pages, but for anything bigger it's a no, thanks. Stay away from this edition.

Don't read Quicksilver though---read one of his good books instead. Three really excellent books he wrote are:

Snow Crash
The Diamond Age
Zodiac

Also Cryptonomicon is pretty good but its veering a little in the direction of where Quicksilver ended up--unreadable mush.

Don't read Quicksilver though---read one of his good books instead. Three really excellent books he wrote are:

Snow Crash
The Diamond Age
Zodiac

Also Cryptonomicon is pretty good but its veering a little in the direction of where Quicksilver ended up--unreadable mush.

Don't read Quicksilver though---read one of his good books instead. Three really excellent books he wrote are:

Snow Crash
The Diamond Age
Zodiac

Also Cryptonomicon is pretty good but its veering a little in the direction of where Quicksilver ended up--unreadable mush.

But it's easy to imagine cases where the government or mafiaa are actively trying to figure out who's doing what, but you can trust people you know face to face.

There's a famous book where just this particular case arises, and it turns out that trusted friend met face-to-face that you pinned all your hopes on turns out to be a government agent. Such betrayal is probably the worst thing a person can encounter. No wonder Orwell said that their vision of an ideal society was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.

Of course it is (again, trivially) true that all human institutions are reflections of human characteristics. What matters for the human impact of those human characteristics is the force-multiplier that the form of institution provides. Individual Huns were little nomads whose particular species of bloody-minded clannishness was not particularly unique or scary. But when pushed out of their grounds by the economics of famine and overpopulation, and organized as shock cavalry under the leadership of Attila, they committed mass murders in Europe on a scale that only the 20th century could equal.

I honestly have no idea what you mean about corporations offering major advantages in terms of control vs. non-corporate forms of organization. Major corporations can get just as out of control as a criminal gang. Jeremy Scahill has already documented how Blackwater Int uses the corporate veil and not-so-secret political connections to operate essentially outside the law. No organ of law-enforcement or other government institution seems able or willing to take them on; after all, they are a legitimate corporation! Are you going to suggest that a billion-dollar private army, operating in the United States and controllable by no authority other than its mostly secret board of directors, is doing no more damage to the nation than, say, some gang of SOF-reading vets robbing a few banks in Idaho? David Korten and many, many others -- from Ralph Nader to Naomi Klein -- have documented how the Supreme Court's Buckley decision, giving corporations the same privileges as individuals in making political contributions, has had enormous deleterious impacts on American democracy for over 30 years. Every attempt to pass legislation to control this influence has ended up doing essentially nothing. Why? Do you really doubt for even a moment that this lack of success has any other cause than the influence of corporate money?

My friend, what's missing from your discussion (and perhaps your thinking) in this area is any consideration of the public interest. I consider that an essential entity. It's the very foundation of my country. It was the first item on the "To Do" list for the Framers of the US Constitution, which is all about defining the public interest, and separating activities supporting that interest (like the press) from all the many legitimate private interests (like other forms of commerce) the constitution also protects.

Please don't mistake me: I don't hate corporations. They represent human art and industry, as well as evil and greed, and as you say, create wealth. There are many good ones who take the public interest seriously and do their bit to promote it in addition to making a profit (I believe I work for one). What I despise, and fear, are contemporary politicians, and the media reporting on them, who seem to take as an article of faith that there actually is no such thing as the public interest -- only competing private interests, which can be organized or not, and supported or not. Your comments above suggest that you (I don't say that you actually do) think the same way. If so, then I really am very surprised indeed, and would invite you to consider more seriously, or at all, the point I'm making. Because if that really is your opinion, and lots of other Americans think the same way, then I'm afraid that a lot more than just the newspaper is dying.

Of course it is (again, trivially) true that all human institutions are reflections of human characteristics. What matters for the human impact of those human characteristics is the force-multiplier that the form of institution provides. Individual Huns were little nomads whose particular species of bloody-minded clannishness was not particularly unique or scary. But when pushed out of their grounds by the economics of famine and overpopulation, and organized as shock cavalry under the leadership of Attila, they committed mass murders in Europe on a scale that only the 20th century could equal.

I honestly have no idea what you mean about corporations offering major advantages in terms of control vs. non-corporate forms of organization. Major corporations can get just as out of control as a criminal gang. Jeremy Scahill has already documented how Blackwater Int uses the corporate veil and not-so-secret political connections to operate essentially outside the law. No organ of law-enforcement or other government institution seems able or willing to take them on; after all, they are a legitimate corporation! Are you going to suggest that a billion-dollar private army, operating in the United States and controllable by no authority other than its mostly secret board of directors, is doing no more damage to the nation than, say, some gang of SOF-reading vets robbing a few banks in Idaho? David Korten and many, many others -- from Ralph Nader to Naomi Klein -- have documented how the Supreme Court's Buckley decision, giving corporations the same privileges as individuals in making political contributions, has had enormous deleterious impacts on American democracy for over 30 years. Every attempt to pass legislation to control this influence has ended up doing essentially nothing. Why? Do you really doubt for even a moment that this lack of success has any other cause than the influence of corporate money?

My friend, what's missing from your discussion (and perhaps your thinking) in this area is any consideration of the public interest. I consider that an essential entity. It's the very foundation of my country. It was the first item on the "To Do" list for the Framers of the US Constitution, which is all about defining the public interest, and separating activities supporting that interest (like the press) from all the many legitimate private interests (like other forms of commerce) the constitution also protects.

Please don't mistake me: I don't hate corporations. They represent human art and industry, as well as evil and greed, and as you say, create wealth. There are many good ones who take the public interest seriously and do their bit to promote it in addition to making a profit (I believe I work for one). What I despise, and fear, are contemporary politicians, and the media reporting on them, who seem to take as an article of faith that there actually is no such thing as the public interest -- only competing private interests, which can be organized or not, and supported or not. Your comments above suggest that you (I don't say that you actually do) think the same way. If so, then I really am very surprised indeed, and would invite you to consider more seriously, or at all, the point I'm making. Because if that really is your opinion, and lots of other Americans think the same way, then I'm afraid that a lot more than just the newspaper is dying.

And science fiction fans will know about Martian salt from Kim Stanley Robinson's vision of a terraforming effort in the trilogy beginning with Red Mars . The survival of bacteria is difficult to acheive on Mars due to the salty soil. Some years after first reading the trilogy, I still remember the nerdy joke some biologist in the trilogy says, that a certain bacterium is so halophilic that "it thinks brine has too much water in it."

The NSA has always kept a close relationship with corporations. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for plenty of examples. They aren't even limited to wooing American companies, as they had a long hold on a Swiss crypto equipment manufacturer. Whatever enticements they offer, they seem to work.

I've oft heard the conspiracy theory that Google was set up just to develop better resources for government privacy violations. Has any elaborated version of this ever been formally published?

First off, check out monstertrak.com; it's specifically for college students, both upcoming graduates looking for permanent jobs and those further away from graduation looking for internships. Now, some comments, as a 1-person operation whose business is growing out of control and who actually has a job listed there, and other places:

Not only does it show a capacity for understanding things, I suspect it shows an understanding of, and capacity for, hard work--believe me, that's something that smart employers understand and appreciate.

This, unfortunately, is quite true. But speaking from my own personal experience, there are always employes who start looking quite late--don't give up.

So, so, so true. So many schools have computer curricula that are junk and only prepare you to have your job sent offshore in a couple of years. Of course most employers look for the buzzwords of the day, but there are ones who look for signs of high intelligence and real passion--and for those people there are jobs out there that won't be offshored. Also take hard advanced math classes, particularly discrete mathematics, and get good grades in them. Then lie during your interview and tell me how easy they were ;-)

Damn straight. Most people who claim to know C++ only know a really dumbed-down baby subset. Read Alexandrescu, then read it again, until you understand it all. Then branch out to other books on template metaprogramming. A candidate who could explain the primary differences between Boost smart pointers and Loki smart pointers, and the rationale for the decisions, is one who's going to impress me.

In the U.S., employers do list and actively search for the new, soon-to-graduate talent. Over here, your advice applies more to those who are already out in the job market.

Maybe I'm just getting older, but this election is really making me lose my faith in the political process. Elections seem to be nothing but bitter slander now. Sure, it's always been that way to some degree, but at least Bill Clinton's first run in the early 1990s, for all the debate and polemics involved, managed to be entertaining (remember Primary Colors ?). This whole process, on the other hand, is just sad.

what liberal media?

Why is everything always men's fault, huh?

Lets see: female author, female researcher, talking about studying men's reactions to images of females. And if the men get the "wrong" interpretation (IOW, not the woman's interpretation) well then they must be wrong by definition, right? Yeah, that sounds like very scientific research, no bias there at all. The whole article just screams feminine bias. The study is set up to show what it concludes in the first place. TFA doesn't say who decided the "correct" responses. Would it happen to have been a woman? ORLY?? How convenient.

WT fuck is with the article headline? Clueless Guys Can't Read Women

Allow me to spin that around the other way: Bitchy women show traits of dishonesty and all-around deception, and lack the ability to say what they mean and mean what they say

Why is my headline any more or less valid? Why is it that if there's a communication problem, then it must be men failing to pick up on women's bullshit cues. Couldn't it be that women don't understand us either, or that neither of us understand each other, and we both have things to learn?

Nope, inconceivable. If there's a communication disconnect, it must be that men are inherently defective and need to be reprogammed.

Check this out, it solidified so many of my opinions on the attitudes of female superiority in American culture: Rantings of a Single Male

Yes, of course men are sexual beasts, but that's how it's supposed to be. If you ladies would just let us be what we're evolved to be, ... who knows? You might actually think it's pretty hot. If not, that's cool too, but then don't dress like sluts or go to bars and then be appalled by guys hitting on you. If you're wearing low rider jeans or high cut tshirts, you're sending an implicit signal that you want it, whether that's the right the signal or not. If that's not what you want, then maybe you're the one who needs to learn more about non-verbal communication.

And guys, ffs, stop being pussies, man up, and flat out refuse to apologize for having testicles.

You should be modded up. Your comments are on the mark.

There are many books that discuss this. Here's a favorite:
    http://www.amazon.com/Sperm-Wars-Infidelity-Conflict-Bedroom/dp/1560258489/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206911964&sr=8-3

If you read that book, it will change your life. You begin to understand love, marriage and emotion around sex are related to sex and that both women and men are very cold and calculating (unconsciously) about who they have sex with, who they make babies with, and who they live with.

None of this is conscious, and all of this is necessary to produce organisms that will survive and reproduce.

Women are the most nuances and coldest in their calculations because they have to be. It's nothing personal, and it benefits us as a race.

Most people don't get it, you do.

Anyway, the book I pointed to should be required reading for every man and to a lesser extent women. It helps you understand yourself better as well as understand the opposite sex: how and why they act the way they do.

Anyway, well done.

• Python Scripting for Computational Science
• Numerical Methods in Engineering with Python

• Python Scripting for Computational Science
• Numerical Methods in Engineering with Python

Amen. Go read Sperm Wars and you'll find that humans aren't different at all in the evolution department.

a print out of the linux kernel and read it until it all makes sense. How do I do this?

Certainly Photoshop has a few remaining strengths over the GIMP when it comes to professional editing. However, the audience that Photoshop Express is marketed too have much simpler needs, and when they might need something a bit more powerful, the GIMP can step in and help. I'm ever more delighted as I discover the power that GIMP has for photo editing on an amateur basis, and it's all free and Free.

All it really needs is a better manual--the GIMP docs are much less friendly than e.g. Beginning GIMP .

Clear communication is king/queen. My wife is Vietnamese, I'm hard of hearing. Perfect match. If she says something and I don't hear it, I say, "What?" She doesn't mind repeating herself because it's practice in a foreign language.

But she is absolutely clear about what she wants 99% of the time. That one percent requires clarification. To me, that is what makes love worth getting into.

For those of you who are still in the dark, check out an interesting book called "Getting the Love You Want", by Harville Hendrix. It is the best book I've ever read about relationships for the following reasons:

1. Gives the best description of the physiological basis for why men and women do mean things to each other in relationships.
2. Gives a clear path towards the love in a relationship by describing how to change the stimulus/response process between each partner to each other without manipulation.

Many of the other books I've read are really a set of rules for "understanding" the other person so that you can "control" the other person without letting him/her know about it. Maybe I'm not that good at selecting books, but that has been my observation.

And then there are 12-step meetings since for many people, this can be a problem that cannot be solved by the unaided will.

Take what you like from this message and leave the rest.

Too many people these days have little or no exposure to C++...

That might be because it is rare to learn C++ outside of an organized course, and if you don't get such a thing in school, it's hard to do it on your own later. O'Reilly apparently publishes a self-teaching book called Practical C++ programming , but it's not widely distributed compared to their interpreted language offerings. Every other C++ introduction I encounter seems to be designed for use in schools, not for autodidacts.

...and never learn how programming in the absence of garbage collection works.

Now, that I must disagree with. Isn't C still part of a basic university computer science education? My formal training in programming is two semesters as an undergraduate, but C was a key part of both.

Women attack users of The Game for only going after beautiful (and unthreateningly dumb) women, and men respond that women do the same thing in only going after men with superficial qualities or large checkbooks.

... whereas women can overlook ugly and stupid, as long as he's rich?

Your point reminds me of the flap over the book The Game , where journalist Neil Strauss uncovered a secret world of men who make picking up women a science. Just take a look at the war in the Amazon reviews and in their attached comments. Women attack users of The Game for only going after beautiful (and unthreateningly dumb) women, and men respond that women do the same thing in only going after men with superficial qualities or large checkbooks. But if you actually read The Game as a chronicle of investigation instead of as a manual for picking up women, you realize that both are wrong. Meeting someone you are going to be interested in for the long-term, as opposed to one night of sex, means seeking out those qualities that might initially turn you off.

More like Snow Crash, or even better: the short story BLIT by David Langford. This story immediately brought BLIT back to mind.

...and by the way, note that the pcworld reviewer who wrote that negative review got 483 thumbs down for his efforts. On Amazon the set is highly rated, and I am more than pleased with it. Ideal match for a PS3.

One of the things that I found interesting in reading Richard Stallman's account in Free as in Freedom of his early Free Software visions was that he was essentially using the copyright system against itself. The sealing of information was an offensive concept to him, but the system could be gamed to ensure freedom of access. It sounds like this innovators are doing the same with the patent system. Now, someone just needs to bend trademark law backwards.

The reason for patenting ideas about the Manhattan Project are well explained in The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes which is a fantastic read. Nearly 1000 pages and Amazon is selling it for less than $15. The covers the recent history of modern science better than any textbook I've found.

Not to mention hurling whomever/whatever is the payload into space with the force of the largest man-made slingshot...

This idea appears in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars when an elevator is cut and the asteroid at the far terminus of the space elevator is flung out towards the orbit of Jupiter.

In this very good book, 'Einsteins Bridge' it is explained that the worst has already happened, we just don't know about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Bridge-John-Cramer/dp/0380788314

Part of what we don't know is that our universe was rebooted to a point 17 years in the past the last time we messed around with these things and even worse outcomes could happen if we do it again.

Yeah, it's Sci-Fi, but I believe every word of it.

You're correct, but the history books I had in school didn't spend too much time on invention, mostly they were about politics.

For an excellent history lesson about inventions, check out James Burke's connections http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0743299558/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206710516&sr=8-1 either the book, or the DVD set.

The books we read in school were very dry and didn't emphasis the interconnectedness of all inventions. Even your summary of what Edison did, left out the fact that he had a lab employing hundreds of people. Edison didn't try tens of thousands of materials, he had assistants doing most of the work, while he supervised. Even though Edison disdained "book learning", he employed many PhDs to help with the process.

You're right about the many people who may have made wires glow, but didn't capitalize on it. Hero had invented a steam engine in ancient Greece, but didn't put it to any practical use.

Also check out the writing of Don Lancaster. http://tinaja.com/ He says that ideas used to be dime a dozen, but now they are penny a pound in hundred pound lots. His point is that people think that their ideas are worth something when it's the implementation that makes a great product. Myths about the invention process are what fuels patent trolls. They seem to think that because they have a great idea on paper, they should be able to sue the people who actually put the work into turning an idea into a product. The invention myths need to be dispelled so that judges and juries will send the trolls packing.

One of the premises of Intelligent Design, as described in "The Privileged Planet", is that God/whatever not only planned for intelligent beings, but planned for them to explore their universe. The book talks about our ideal placement in the milky way for observation, yet with sufficient protection from gamma bursts, the fortuitous placement of the moon allowing solar eclipses to reveal the corona, etc. A Bible passage would be Proverbs, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search out a matter." Part of trusting God in this viewpoint is assuming that, barring deliberate or negligent self destruction, the next discovery won't destroy us. Although each advance in physics brings more and more dangerous knowledge to light, we will be able cope technically. (Moral failings are another matter.)

The things that they've said they are concerned about sound like science fiction

More specifically, they sound like David Brin's Earth.

Anyhoo, I think Window/TiVo/PlaysForSure users can still pay $2 on Amazon Unbox, get to keep it and have no commercials.

(OTOH: Who the frick wants to keep episodes of The Office?)

...that a crazy Brazilian invented the airplane, before the Wright Brothers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont
http://www.amazon.com/Wings-Madness-Alberto-Santos-Dumont-Invention/dp/B000FVHJ94

Billing is based on instance-hours not cpu-hours. So, for every hour or partial hour your instance is running, you get charged. It doesn't matter if you're a 1% cpu usage or 100% cpu usage during that time: http://www.amazon.com/ec2

pricing and bandwidth is oulined here about halfway down the page. and a nifty pricing calculator here.

looks pretty reasonable to me, but i dont really have anything to compare it to. no minimum fee. it's completely based on bandwidth, resources, and usage.