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I can't wait to play God of War 2

Why wait?

Send some libertarians up there. ;-)

http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Harsh-Mistress-Robert-Heinlein/dp/0340837942

The series sounds like All My sins remembered by Joe Haldeman. An average citizen is conditioned through hypnotherapy to assume given roles for a time period until the mission is over. After that he returns to base, debriefs and is assigned another mission. Eventually the brain cannot take the strain of repeated wipes and reprogramming and by the end when he is not on mission he is a schizophrenic stew of previous programmed personalities (thus - All my sins remembered).

A book by Joe Haldeman.

Glenda Ruth Blaine uses a picture-based password in Niven and Pournelle's The Gripping Hand.

I have a set of the old wooden ones I bought a few years ago for my kids. You can still get them at http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-54809-Tinkertoy-Classic-Jumbo/dp/B00004TFRN

You're not the first one with that thought.

Printcrime
by Cory Doctorow

Forematter:
This story is part of Cory Doctorow's 2007 short story collection "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present," published by Thunder's Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you'll find more at the end of this file.
This story and the other stories in the volume are available at:
http://craphound.com/overclocked
You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20
In the words of Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.
--
Introduction to Printcrime:
Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who'd been to hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the future of "intellectual property." The record exec opined the recording industry's great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or patents.
My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish record industry.
I was less impressed.
It's almost certainly true that control over the production of trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers' impact on trademarks is a stupendously weird idea.
It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It's true, as far as it goes, but it's so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind.
When Nature magazine asked me if I'd write a short-short story for their back-page, I told them I'd do it, then went home, sat down on the bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we were in business.
--
Printcrime
(Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)
The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals--performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They

I could see where there might be patterns depending on how often they change the balls and clean the insides of the machines.

Also there's a book about rigging the lotto called The Winner by David Baldacci. He gets a job cleaning the machines and takes 2 sprays that repel each other. Puts one inside by the exit hole and the other on all the balls but the one he wants to come up.

I think calling a $60 5.1 speaker system a "home theater" might be going a bit overboard...

The speakers themselves play little role in your sound system, so it's fine if you get ones so cheap. A real home theatre environment, however, depends entirely on $200 speaker cables. Good (= expensive) speaker cables can compensate for lesser stereo equipment, as well as for a small penis.

Interested parties should check out The Math Instinct by Keith Devlin, who points out that many higher mammals have a kind of number sense (lions seem to be able to tell by the number of roars whether another pride has more or fewer members than their own). Gorillas and chimps can be taught to do single-digit arithmetic, although it takes much longer than it does with humans. And infant humans can definitely recognize, for instance, that one-ball plus one-ball should equal two-balls and that something's wrong when it becomes three-balls instead.

Further, there are tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures still alive on earth whose entire grasp of counting is "one, two, lots" or "one, two, three, lots" -- but, interestingly enough, never "one, two, three, four, lots." Once you get beyond three or four, mathematics becomes something that has to be invented.

I find this interesting, personally -- all animal brains are built as a kind of pattern-recognition system, something computers are very bad at. All human cultures have a kind of language with a fully-recognized grammar for communicating past, present and future ideas. But counting, clearly, isn't innate to the brain. It has to be deliberately learned, like writing. And like writing, it's not something that's really useful except in more advanced money-using societies.

For those interested in hearing Bruce Schneier dispassionately and quite reasonably shred a lot of the "security" measures implemented since 9/11, I suggest reading his book Beyond Fear. The subtitle says it all: thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world. The book was reviewed on Slashdot not long ago.

The book takes a very general approach to security, analyzing it with the most basic categorizations, while using very clear real-life examples to illustrate. The final chapters deal specifically with security against terrorism, particularly since 9/11. His conclusion is that, from a security standpoint, most of the measures put in place - additional airport scrutiny, massive centralized databases looking for suspicious patterns, the move towards national ID cards, etc. - are largely ineffective as security measures. The massive trade-off of decreased privacy and liberty coupled with enormous cost for these measures make them especially unreasonable. In short, the widespread perceived risk and culture of fear it has fostered has made our response to the new terroristic threat wildly out-of-proportion with the actual risk.

It's mostly preaching to the choir here at Slashdot, but I think this book should be as widely read as possible.

Coincidentally i just finished reading Radioactive Boy Scout.
It is an amazing story by itself, and waaay beyond the dumb chemistry...
I mean come on if a boy could build a FBR in his backyard, why can't we do the same?

Disclaimer: This boy did it before Bush and his group of paranoid Darth Vaders took over. If her had done it today, the FEMA, FBI not to mention the secret service would have taken the boy to Gitmo and our wonderful AG would have crowed to FOX News about how an Al-Qaeda network about to be started was bashed...and FOX News would have spread more bad info...

The book info is here here: http://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Boy-Scout-Frightening-Homemade/dp/0812966600/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8603431-1875920?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193921696&sr=8-1

Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on "security", and thereby divert potential resources from "investment" and compound their long-term dilema.

-The Rise & Fall of Great Powers, pg xxiii

Heck, I got the warm fuzzy long ago when Claritin-D, technically an OTC drug would only be sold from behind TC, and then only if you present picture identification, and even then you could only purchase enough to take one a day for ten days!

The death of a certain type of chemistry set. There are a pretty wide number of sets available including the specific kit mentioned in TFA (Chem C3000) and the reviews there both mention the difficulty in gathering some of the materials necessary to doing the expirements. I don't think it is just terrorism though. Terrorism, a litigious society, the war on drugs - I think any one alone would have probably been enough, and we've got all three.

I wonder if this might signal an opportunity for some entrepeneur to develop a virtual chem lab. It's not exactly the same, but at least it would give kids an opportunity to learn and explore. It could also offer features you wont find in any real chemistry set. Nice graphics showing what is going on on a much lower level. A virtual professor to help out and explain. Tools and materials that are too expensive or that really would be too dangerous.

The death of a certain type of chemistry set. There are a pretty wide number of sets available including the specific kit mentioned in TFA (Chem C3000) and the reviews there both mention the difficulty in gathering some of the materials necessary to doing the expirements. I don't think it is just terrorism though. Terrorism, a litigious society, the war on drugs - I think any one alone would have probably been enough, and we've got all three.

I wonder if this might signal an opportunity for some entrepeneur to develop a virtual chem lab. It's not exactly the same, but at least it would give kids an opportunity to learn and explore. It could also offer features you wont find in any real chemistry set. Nice graphics showing what is going on on a much lower level. A virtual professor to help out and explain. Tools and materials that are too expensive or that really would be too dangerous.

This article was based on research published in 2004; see Got Game. Seems like there might be more recent thinking available...

A quick googling reveals Prof puts gaming to work, which was actually published today.

Also, the authors and their publisher have republished the "Got Game" book this year with a different title (The Kids are Alright:...) but the same content. Seems a bit underhanded, says one recent reviewer.

Sure, sure... mod down for relevance to topic...

get on it chippie

There are so many ubuntu books available - it's really quite an indication of how popular this distro has become. Though the same measuring stick would show that fedora has more material out there. It has been around longer though.
 
I work with Red Hat in my job, so I stick with Fedora but I'm seeing more folks around here running Ubuntu on their desktops.

There are so many ubuntu books available - it's really quite an indication of how popular this distro has become. Though the same measuring stick would show that fedora has more material out there. It has been around longer though.
 
I work with Red Hat in my job, so I stick with Fedora but I'm seeing more folks around here running Ubuntu on their desktops.

...these things are usually obsolete in, oh say, 6 months or so.

Oh, I can think of some computing books which are just as useful today as when first published. Maybe the quality of a technology could be judged by how long its documentation goes without being superseded.

However, any Linux guide will stand the test of time better if it explains matters through command-line tools. Graphical interfaces change too rapidly.

...these things are usually obsolete in, oh say, 6 months or so.

Oh, I can think of some computing books which are just as useful today as when first published. Maybe the quality of a technology could be judged by how long its documentation goes without being superseded.

However, any Linux guide will stand the test of time better if it explains matters through command-line tools. Graphical interfaces change too rapidly.

...these things are usually obsolete in, oh say, 6 months or so.

Oh, I can think of some computing books which are just as useful today as when first published. Maybe the quality of a technology could be judged by how long its documentation goes without being superseded.

However, any Linux guide will stand the test of time better if it explains matters through command-line tools. Graphical interfaces change too rapidly.

I agree with what you're saying.

But your starting example brings up a question. I wasn't interested in Civil War Reenactors until I read that there was such a thing, and then I got curious. Now I want to go read about it. From your post I get the feeling that you think most people aren't like this, that most people just don't care about anything they don't already know about. Do you think this is true? Coz, for my group of friends and family, it sure isn't -- if I say "hey, I just read a really cool book about Oranges, they'll all want to read it.

I guess maybe Wikipedia wants to be just for people who only want to read about things they already know.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114728/ Narrated by our pal Bill Shatner too.
http://www.amazon.com/Trinity-Beyond-Atomic-Bomb-Movie/dp/B00000IML5

Absoloutely awesome movie, probably a bit twisted but I love atomic bombs and seeing them go off, beautiful things, horrible of course but beautiful too, fascinating stuff.
They cover Tsar Bomba in that, IIRC the mushroom cloud went 64km's in the air and people would have got 3'rd degree burns at up to 100 miles away.
(check wikipedia, I'm not linking it for whoring value)

Here's a snippet of it as it goes off underwater.
Seeing the size of that amount of water shoot up with those tiny battleships in the foreground, along with that music - goosebumps.

Epic stuff, check it out people.

20th Century physics is based on mathematical trivia from centuries before. See Why Beauty Is Truth and Fearful Symmetry for popular accounts of how stuff that appeared to be total trivia - even to most of the mathematicians who indulged in it - turned out to be the basis of our best equations for describing reality.

If progress had depended on Wikipedia, it wouldn't have happened. And it's not just in hard science - an art historian could provide countless examples of what became major movements in art that began far out in the margins. In censoring "trivia" is Wikipedia castrating humanity's future?

20th Century physics is based on mathematical trivia from centuries before. See Why Beauty Is Truth and Fearful Symmetry for popular accounts of how stuff that appeared to be total trivia - even to most of the mathematicians who indulged in it - turned out to be the basis of our best equations for describing reality.

If progress had depended on Wikipedia, it wouldn't have happened. And it's not just in hard science - an art historian could provide countless examples of what became major movements in art that began far out in the margins. In censoring "trivia" is Wikipedia castrating humanity's future?

The big problem is the systemic denial that Wikipedia could eventually be the sum of all recordable knowledge, and the push to try and remove valuable information "in favor of" more notable entries.

I agree. I remember back in the early days of Wikipedia, the community really thought that Wikipedia could expand infinitely to cover all human knowledge, and there was even talk of the "Allwiki" (reference to the Allthing of Simmon's Hyperion novels). I took a break from the project for a while, and when I came back I was disappointed to see that the community was no for keeping articles only when they met some vague and arbitrary usability standards.

Of course, I don't know why I am talking about the state of Wikipedia. I long ago gave up on the project. First I moved to Citizendium, but then I realized that as an academic, I've got access to all the peer-reviewed material I want in the university library, so I just don't need an online encyclopedia all that much. Nowadays, my only contribution to Wikipedia is when for kicks I go on and make vandalism so subtle, in an academic field so specialized, that it takes months or years to be undone.

But Lucas recovered!

But will NBC or RIAA Labels?

With Lucas, I can buy the original Star Wars for about the same price as the Blank tape my bootleg copy came on.
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Trilogy-Mark-Hamill/dp/B00004XPP0

T120 blank VHS tape at that time was about $15 each.

Hell, even Henry Rollins ran into trouble in Australia. Some guy saw him reading the book Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam In Central Asia on a plane and turned him in as a terrorist. And you think AMERICANS are touchy.

no service level guarantees and really no information about just where things will work and where things will start to break down.

Incidentally, for anyone who wants to learn something about automata and theory of computation and doesn't know where to start, I highly recommend the following book by Michael Sipser: Introduction to the Theory of Computation.

It's quite pricey for such a small book, but it's worth its weight in gold (i.e., the time you save by reading this little masterpiece instead of something else that's less well written). You can find the 1st edition used for much cheaper than the 2nd edition, and the differences between the two editions are pretty minor.

p.s. I have no connection to the book or the author. I'm just a very happy customer.

Bother. Link didn't work:

http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Pi-David-Blatner/dp/0802775624/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-4306547-9692143?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193681689&sr=8-1

Speaking of scorch marks on the wall behind the computer, Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime had a Steam Cooled Nano-Supercomputer. It looked like one of those aerators you screw on to the end of the faucet on your kitchen sink. And that's what the main character did with it. The water would vaporize as steam, dissipating enormous amounts of heat.

Anyone that uses the word 'semantic' with 'web' should be pointed at and laughed at, then perhaps hit in the face with a brick. Keep trying, marketeers, you'll find a new way to game your hits and get another easy payday sooner or later.

The driving force behind semantic web research is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, hardly a marketer just trying to get rich from buzzwords. He's an academic, and it's precisely in academic circles that the semantic web is already a reality. Just see Visualizing the Semantic Web ed. Geroimenko & Chen (Springer-Verlag, 2nd ed. 2005). It shows several projects where the concepts of the semantic web were used to great effect.

If anything, marketers have been staying away from the semantic web, since developing semantic web technologies requires the sort of learning and practising that costs money, when employees could just trot out the same FUBARed markup and table-based layouts that they are already used to.

I am interested in evidence, of course, it's just that "The Case for Christ" is strongly criticized for being one-sided - it has not done any investigation on the critical side, only on the apologetic side. See all the main Amazon reviews, for instance, or this more in depth review I found when looking for something else.

Here's another book that seems less biased: http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Evidence-Research-Discoveries-Investigated/dp/0062514725/ref=sid_dp_dp/104-5990516-7600706

Eivind.

I am interested in evidence, of course, it's just that "The Case for Christ" is strongly criticized for being one-sided - it has not done any investigation on the critical side, only on the apologetic side. See all the main Amazon reviews, for instance, or this more in depth review I found when looking for something else.

Here's another book that seems less biased: http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Evidence-Research-Discoveries-Investigated/dp/0062514725/ref=sid_dp_dp/104-5990516-7600706

Eivind.

-FL

If you get the "Super Saving" shipping (i.e. free) when eligible, they'll sit on your order for a several days. If I just buy the regular USPS shipping when he free one isn't available, they ship in a day.

Amazon doesn't intentionally delay your order, but the potential delay is documented. The delay occurs when you order items that come from different fulfillment centers. Amazon aggregates the items by trucking them to a single FC, then ships them to you. (This was explained to me by a co-worker when I worked for Amazon.)

I always order books with Super Saver shipping and they often arrive in three days.

"While the idea that the umpteen dimensions beyond those that we usually perceive might be the source of some of these unexplained phenomenon is certainly a valid argument, it is no more or less valid that one suggesting that the flying spaghetti monster is responsible.

What I am suggesting is an argument based upon current knowledge. Not that it is more correct, but it assumes far less and is thus more readily proven false, which is key to any scientific argument."

I think you're missing the point, I'm not saying ALL "paranormal" phenomena is real, nor am I trying to "prove" to anyone anything. My opinion is my own, I don't need to prove myself to anybody, since the scientific tools and crudely formed minds of this time are not exactly the of the highest quality. I'm saying what is classified as paranormal falls into two categories 1) Mistaken / error/ mistaken identity and 2) Fragments of real phenomena misinterpreted, but which has some sort of basis in the universes functioning itself even if our tools and science is not advanced enough to "objectify" (making it objective) it, via the usual multiple rigorous observations, measurements and testing, etc. So what I am saying is: Ssome of the (a subset) of features or claims of the socalled 'paranormal' have a natural explanation and are actually real (i.e. precognitive foresight).

Also, science is in constant flux, the state of scientiic 'truth' is dependent on

1) Quality of the minds
2) Quality of the tools
3) Falsifiability

I'm sure you would admit that science is fallible because science is based on fallible minds. I could use the argument that your mind and scienctific concepts and tools are too crude to comprehend my argument *at this time* and in this *age*, and it would be a valid argument. Even though I couldn't show you were wrong in the time and age in which we lived (due to our limited lifespans). Now for example, should we be immortal, we can wait and see who was right or wrong, but we don't have infinite time (i.e. time to search for evidence to support assertions claims in the - ritualized - scientific way (and lets face it, it is ritualized), many scientific things were not discovered in any prescribed rigorous way what-so-ever, and thats why I like Paul Feyabrand -- http://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/0860916464

He Feyerabend is not anti-reason, not anti-science and not a subjectivist. What he is advocating is scientific anarchism, meaning: science does not proceed by any set of rules, criterion or methods.

Now we know peoples of the past would not be able to comprehend our world because they would be too crude and misinformed, until they were brought up to speed. The problem is, what if someone perceives something that will be scientific in the future (i.e. evolution for instance, evolutionary ideas are older then darwin) but they didn't have a science to explain the *mechanics* of it? Science ultimately is about visual mechanics of how somethign works, hence why einstein said "If I can't visualize it, I can't understand it!". Language is a vulgar description of geometric objects which we 'see' be it seeing with our eyes, ears or minds, the concepts "objective" and "subjective" are empty phrases, since what was once "objective" became false, or pieces of it did, and therefore "subjective" as theories grow and are revised.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sayin "ghosts" are real entities, I'm saying they could be echoes or shadows of information of things that exist. Once you get into string theory and some of the more weird quantum behaviour (where causality loses meaning, etc) it is more then possible that counterinuitive phenomena to todays science can be perceived by certain people for reasons not yet accessable to current scientific thinking.

We're still naturally born and not engineered, so that means we are hopelessly and ineffably crude. I have no doubt you also believe tha

As a bonus, you could get some component cables and play in native 16:9. 480p, but at least it's 16:9.

If you want more mainstream literature try this:

http://www.amazon.com/Billions-Missing-Links-Mysteries-Evolution/dp/0736917462

In his book "The Real Frank Zappa" released in 1989 Zappa explains his plan for the future of music distribution. He says that consumers arn't that interested in CDs or vinyl and explains how you could use the cable tv or telephone system to digitally transmit music (and cover art, etc) into peoples homes on a subscription basis. This was back in 1989, long before your interweb thing took off.

-FL

Right, because the American revolutionaries indiscriminately targeted women and children.

The interesting thing to me is that they appear to have modeled this pandemic spread as originating in Lagos, Nigeria which would be a relatively slow introduction or pathogenic spread into the rest of the world until it hits an area like Beijing, Calcutta or any other rapidly growing supermetropolis where you have hordes of people living in less than ideal conditions right next to others who travel extensively throughout the developed world.

Lagos is a growing supermetropolis. At current rates, it is expected to be the largest city in the world by mid-century.

What are you going to do when the zombies show up at your door?

Try to outwit them as the last sane man in a world gone mad. After all, haven't you read I Am Legend ?

Sure. I don't disagree at all. The road block though, is the folks who can't stand that we're (The USA) is being attacked. And, I personally know a few folks like this, we have to deal with the folks who firmly believe that the terrorists are this group of folks who are guided by an ideology that's beyond reason. The person I'm thinking of equates the Islamic Terrorists with the Japanese who refused to surrender. I found it quite enlightening that, even after dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, the "war council" (of WWII Japan) was STILL divided about surrendering to the US. They would have rather died than surrender - even if that included every last man and child on the Japanese Island. There are folks in the US who think that ALL Muslims have this ideology.

A book that I found to have a fresh interpretation of all of this is ThePower of a Positive NO

The Arab people are REALLY pissed off and some of them are soooo pissed off, they want die and take everyone else out with them. Add in religion (Islam) and you get a VERY powerful force. What I mean by "add in Islam", I'm sure you've seen the interview with some tribesman somewhere who's went fight in Iraq (or wherever) to help his "Muslim Brother".

That's how to beat the terrorists: refuse to be terrorized.,p/>Amen to that! But tell that to the folks who are saying "I need to protect my children!" Even thought the odds are that their children will die in an auto accident while their parents are driving. Or that their children will die because of all the fast food their parents feed them. You know what I'm talking about: folks do not understand risk and where it's coming from.

I suspect that the language of mathematics will ultimately fall short in modeling reality. My hunch is that the Universe has properties that flow (uniquely) from its "wholeness". Science, language, and mathematics depend on chopping reality up in bits, describing things by distinction. David Bohm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm/ develops this interpretation very clearly in his book "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" http://www.amazon.com/Wholeness-Implicate-Order-Routledge-Classics/dp/other-editions/0415289793/ref=dp_ed_all/ .