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Oh god, we all should have expected this from Zonk by now...

The current 60 gig PS3 is now out of production and is now $499 as anyone can see here on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/videogames/

There will be a 80 gig model that is introduced next month that will have partial software emulation - right now European PS3s with EE emulation are at ~90 percent PS2 compatibility. As the remaining stock of 60 gigs get sold the 80 gig will come down to the same price as the current 60 gig model.

As most people know, harddrives don't really drop in price they just get larger capacity for the same price and eventually the low end drives start to become more expensive. That is happening with the 60 gig laptop drives and Sony is moving on to the cheaper in bulk 80 gig drives. So costs will be about the same for the larger harddrive. The removal of the EE hardware and the usual manufacturing cost cutting, including 65nm later this year, will mean the 80 gig PS3 model will be actually cheaper to manufacture than the current 60 gig models.

So by the time you can't get a 60 gig anymore 80 gigs will have moved down in price to $499.

There are still some left, but they are of the high-mobility variety.

Competition from online sales is not a piracy issue you cretin.

Absolutely true. The prices for music has continued to skyrocket in spite of competition for the entertainment dollar.

I graduated HS in 1975. I bought a few records, but very few because they were expensive. There are many things
to spend entertainment dollars on now besides a few records (CD's now) that didn't exist then. I do spend my money on these items instead of CD's.

1 Internet access
2 DVD's Sometimes 4 for $20!
3 Games, Game PC's & Upgrades E6700 Core 2 Duo Woo Hoo
4 High priced gas from 50 cents to 3 dollars
5 Day admission to State and Fedral Parks Now $5/day was free
6 MP3 player No longer stuck with radio station commercials all day
7 Camcorder
8 Digital Camera
9 Photo printer
10 GPS and associated Maps
11 Nice car

Somehow the music industry thinks their slice of my entertainment dollar won't shrink if they raise prices to cover lower sales volume? They added DRM & copy protection to make the product more valuable to me so I'll run
right out and buy a copy?? Yea Right!! DRM and copy protection reduces the value of their product. If I can't
load it on my media server to put on my MP3 player or stream in the house, I can't use their version of the CD. I look elsewhere. DRM increases piracy as the legit product doesn't work.

The only movie I have ever downloaded on P-P is Open Season. That was until I found I could call them and get a replacement DVD for my defective by design one. The extra copy protection is why I went elsewhere to load it on
the media server for the kids.

I was in Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. Just for grins I looked for Phantom of the Opera. I have heard many dirivative works including MIDI files and Karaoke files and decided to check it out. The CD for just the music in the US is over $30.. What are they smoking?
http://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Opera-Original-1986- London/dp/B00004YTY2
List price 37.98
In a nutshell, I bought Fiddler on the Roof DVD and Sound of Music DVD and Sister Act DVD instead with about the same money.

We only have a couple of window A.C. units in our house, and our DVD player (a PS2) is hooked up to our downstairs TV. Needless to say, it makes watching movies on the dog days of summer a drag. I use handbrake to rip my own DVD's and then put them on my video iPod. With a cheap cable, I can hook it up to the small TV in my bedroom so my wife and I can watch our movies in bed in the cool air. And no, they are not porn.

I highly recommend the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City if you find yourself tempted to think that this war has been run with an eye toward good governance and oversight. Sadly, it wasn't written until after the last presidential election.

I was reading Clive Cussler's Polar Shift yesterday, which has a fictional discovery of a baby Mammoth in Siberia. Then, I click on my /. RSS feed today, and there it is as the first entry.

In the book, I think they were planning to clone it with an elephant.

The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney

WARNING: This book will make you very pissed off.

It describes obvious efforts by the administration to suppress findings that go against its political agenda. The most insidious tactic used is the muddying of waters. Especially using an amazing term known as "junk science". "Junk Science" basically means any scientific finding that doesn't agree with the administration.

The bundle with the PSP doesn't contain any UMD movies; it comes with the Family Guy Freakin' Sweet Collection, which is just five episodes (mind you, the best five episodes of the first three seasons.) It also comes with Daxter and a 1 GB memory stick.

The most exciting announcement about the entire conference for me was the new PSP's TV-out feature. I was disappointed that it didn't have TV-out on release several years ago, and I am very excited about it now. It's finally like a portable console, and the portability is finally a reason to actually buy UMD content. It's one of the things that is making me consider getting one someday, and the $199 bundle does seem like a great deal.

Also, Echochrome looks totally awesome. If I don't play that game soon, I think I might die.

"Though they had to be running Windows"

Come on man, you knew this, but in case you didn't

http://www.amazon.com/Macsoft-Halo-Mac/dp/B00006IQ TH
http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2003/11/halo/

In this case, he's basically (but not totally) correct. The enigma would have been virtually incapable of being "solved", but the Germans decided to save effort and did not use their keys properly. Sure, they were distributed securely, but they weren't used properly.

Particular messages were sent at the same time every day, which the allies were able to guess certain portions of (ie: sending weather reports just after 8am, and listing the cities in a predictable order). Additionally, the same text was routinely encrypted twice using the same key, which is a bad idea when you're using a system which will encrypt the same string differently each time. These "cribs" allowed cryptographers to work out particulars of how the machine was configured at a given time (scrambler arrangements, plugboard settings...), which drastically reduced the amount of possible keys. After this reduction in the range of the keys, a brute-force attack was possible. Had the German beaurocracy not weakened the power of the Enigma by introducing these redundancies into the system, it would not have been cracked.

For anyone interested in cryptography (with an entire long chapter dedicated to the Enigma, its construction, and how it was broken) from both a historical and technical standpoint, I recommend "The Code Book" by Simon Singh as a good place to start.

Over hyped before they had a decent implementation...

The Semantic Web has been a reality for years, used for individual projects assumptions can be made about the data coming in. See Visualising the Semantic Web ed. Geroimeno and Chen (Springer-Verlag, 2005) for tonnes of real-world examples, and the book's even reached a second edition from further examplary work being done. Just because high-schoolers on MySpace users aren't sending valid RDF back and forth amongst themselves doesn't mean that the concepts behind the Semantic Web haven't already been implemented to the benefit of other projects.

Sorry but the "analog hole" is crap when it comes to HD. The bitrates are just too high to be grabbing the uncompressed (aka analog) video and compressing it down for later viewing in some sort of realtime fashion.

Soo... screw the PS3 with software emulation for PS2 and 1 titles, I'll buy a 360 that has software emulation for Xbox games instead..

Seems like more FUD to me, no real mention as to the fact that (for now) the PS3 is #1 on amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/videogames/re f=pd_ts_vg_nav/104-3196751-9419921?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKI KX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=1Y0CG236NWPTM8FF9HH1 &pf_rd_t=2101&pf_rd_p=221591101&pf_rd_i=home

Sure it won't last forever like that, but they sure as hell ain't end of the world.

I think people really like to rag on the PS3 for not being vary successful, but it seems to me that it's not doing terribly bad. If you look at sales numbers and align the launches of the PS3 and the Xbox 360, the PS3 is more or less on the same track that the Xbox 360 was on.

If you check Amazon you can see that the PS3 moved up to the number one selling item in the video game section. I think it was substantially lower (If I recall correctly it was 28th) before this from what I've been reading on other sites.

With E3 and the possibilities of some big ticket games being shown, It's possible for Sony to pick up even more steam. They've done a lot to shoot themselves in the foot, but I think they can still make a decent showing this round. Right now it's outpacing the Gamecube and the original Xbox, both of which were wonderful systems with great exclusives. I think Sony is given a lot more crap than they deserve.

One of the best introductions to AI is Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

Items sold by Amazon.com LLC, or its subsidiaries, and shipped to destinations in the states of Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, or Washington are subject to tax.

The "Our Price" amounts displayed for goods sold by Amazon.co.uk are inclusive of UK VAT. ...
For non-book items that are shipped to addresses within the UK (such as giftwrap, audio books, CDs, vinyl records, minidiscs, videos, DVDs, electrical and photographic items, toys, software and PC and video games) the UK VAT rate is 17.5%.

US: $214.99

Europe: £184.98 ($371.92)

Yup. The EU sure showed them!

Want to take a bet that MS is expecting to sell more than 3 million (1/2 billion / $150 delta) copies of Vista in Europe?

Heh. I'll take double or nothing on "this is inline with MS's estimates when they got involved in the legal process". ;)

Blu-ray doesn't sell to the "average" consumer, Blu-ray sells to the consumer who already has a substantial investment in HDTV.

Blu-ray Disc Store

For in-depth coverage of this issue, read "The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture", by Andrew Keen. That covers the subject much better than the usual blogodreck.

One of Keen's points is that blogs and Craigslist are killing newspaper reporting. There are fewer people whose day job it is to go out and find out what's going on. Most blogs rehash information collected by others; true reportage is rare. Pick up a newspaper and see how few stories were initiated by reporters, as opposed to starting from some form of publicity. This is a long-term trend; it's taken decades to reach this point. Compare newspapers from 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980, and 2000.

Really my wrist hurts as using mouse is obligation on my desktop, and that too for an average of 12 hours a day.

How many times is this old bit about Prophet Muhammed marrying a 9 year old girl going to be passed around? He wasn't married to her, he was *betrothed*. And the age of Aisha is based on a unverified oral hadith by an author with little credibility who lived over a century after the Prophet. Other traditions says she was 14 to 19. In cultures where underage engagements still happen (India for example) betrothal and consumation are seperated by years until the girl has reached puberty at least. There is no reason to assume it would have been otherwise in this case. Unless of course you have an ax to grind.

(Reza Aslan has a better overview of this in his book "No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam")

No matter how bad it is, sex with a mare is worse.

Why do people keep saying the UMD is small? It's not, its physical size is way bigger than it should be, for its storage capacity. You can get 2 gig SD cards dirt cheap already, which are smaller, technically hold more, more energy-efficient, and probably load faster, too.

It's a proprietary, unwieldy format (can't display UMD movies on a tv, can't get writers or blank ones), but it's also bulky compared to alternatives (hell, i'd rather carry USB sticks), and small storage compared to alternatives.

The entire concept of putting the state before the individual, is a cornerstone of fascist thinking.

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" - John F. Kennedy

You need to review a math/logic text. "Facism implies Service" does not mean that "Service implies Facism".

I haven't read enough of Heinlein ... I can certainly see why Starship Troopers in particular would make someone consider Heinlein militaristic.

I apologize for being repettitive but the movie was a pale shadow of the book, even with the book being a pretty short one. The book actually delevs into this topic far more than the movie. Heinlen was absolutely not militaristic in any fascist sense. He was coming from the perspective that a military is a necessary evil, and that having a military inferior to an aggressor invites aggression. History agrees with this perspective. You might want to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Socie ties/dp/0393317552. Over and over, in ancient and modern history, societies that lose the ability to wage war become victims - unless they have proxies who will defend them.

To me the most interesting, and a bit scary, thing with the movie is how blatant they managed to make the fascist/nazi imagery, complete with nazi style propaganda and uniforms while still getting viewers to cheer for the human military)

We embraced Stalin the fight Hitler, you don't think we would embrace Hitler to fight bugs. :-)

Some reading material for you, then, by the guy who wrote the book on space mission design: Space Mission Analysis and Design

It seems that they already had designed for several days of reserve power (a.k.a survival mode). The dust event threatens to exceed that amount, which could spell doom for the rovers. It is in no way forgone that it WILL exceed that amount, or even that the rovers will fail to restart after the event, however the latter is likely to follow if the former occurs.

If your plan makes the mission too expensive to fly for the sake of extending post EOL endurance, I'd say it's a bad plan. Consider the much ridiculed Ford Pinto. There were many improvements that could've been made to improve its safety, and by much better margins than moving the fuel tank around. But if each of the $5 here, $10 there improvements had been made, it would have ceased to be an affordable car.

You have to build the machine you can, with the budget you have. Not the budget you'd like to have. to paraphrase a famous statesman.

Seriously, six nines costs a lot of money -- is it really necessary? We have a lot of redundant technology that we didn't have before. If my land phone is out, I have a cell phone. If the land phone goes to 4 nines, and I have a 2 nines cell phone (disclaimer: numbers are rectal extractions for illustration purposes only), as a system, that would be 6 nines (.0001 x .01 for double outage). Would it be OK for the phone company to charge extra for the 6 nines POTS and let those happy with 4 pay less? Verizon is competing with companies that don't offer six nines to a public that doesn't want (or perhaps doesn't know they want) six nines. They are offering a product at the same level (arguably better) of service as their competitors.

Actually, no. It was designed for three months. They, of course, made any changes that might make it last longer that didn't effect the budget, but they very definitely avoided any design improvements intended to lengthen it beyond 90 days, unless those improvements cost no money. The budget was very tight and many potential design improvements to make the rovers last longer were specifically rejected. (See the book by the project lead.)

Well, I guess it's a form of socializing and these people get off on it...

While it is good to see the findings of evolutionary psychology become more mainstream much of this has been available for a long time. For anyone who wants a more comprehensive covering of evolutionary pyschology I highly recommend Robert Wright's The Moral Animal. Oh and before people post their kneejerk reactions to the findings of evolutionary pyschology, calm down evol pysch doesn't commit the naturalistic fallacy. However, it would be wise to keep in mind our evolutionary past before designing cures for social ills.

For a deeply researched and most excellent collection of ideas, evidence, and conclusions along these lines, but perhaps argued more persuasively, see "The Lucifer Pricipal" (available here) by Howard Bloom. It is revolutionary, and a revelation. It's an excellent work, which changed my thinking.

then you need to read "Bill the Galactic Hero":
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill,_the_Galactic_He ro

and here it is on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Galactic-Hero-Harry-Har rison/dp/0743487079/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7428068-27096 66?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183845880&sr=1-1

holy shit, original paperbacks going for $70. Note to self: must dig thru paperbacks to see if I still have this. Anyhow, this was a great parody of the fascist sci fi from heinlen...

la la la la la la la la la

It's been done already....

Scroll down to the track listing.... "The La La Song".

Given your "someone's at the door" comment, were you thinking of Zebra?

Your government has got itself suckered into two wars it will not and cannot win

How is this news? He performed a copyrighted song. It's illegal to photocopy and distribute even sections from copyrighted books or music, even in a classroom environment. If I recorded myself reading Blade's Lady, and distributed the recording because listening to it cured cancer, I still would be violating copyright law.

It's not the math, it's the explanatory power. Read The Fabric Of Reality by Deutsch, for instance. The Copenhagen Interpretation says "... and then a miracle happens" (meaning the faster-than-light collapse of the wavefunction). The MWI says there's nothing faster-than-light about it; there's just no collapse.

No faster-than-light travel, causality, single-valued universe. Pick any two. That'll give you your preferred QM interpretation. (Hint: FTL = CI, backward causality = TI, more or less, and multivalued universe = MWI.)

Oh, not to mention the MWI provides a strong theoretical underpinning for free will, causality, probability, and counterfactuals.

I've been talking and listening to audiobooks and texting and doing some web browsing and have yet to go under 50%. According to Apple, a battery that should be good for 400 FULL charge cycles should give me around 1,000 partial charges at that usage pattern, meaning 1,000 DAYS of use, assuming I recharge it every day.

That's almost three years, at which point it's supposed to still have 80% of the original power.

As to portable rechargers...

http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F8E464-Backup-Battery -Pack/dp/B00009KAPW

Sure, it's inelegant, but we are talking about emergency power here, not day-to-day use.

Get one of these guys:

3400mAh External Lithium-ion Rechargeable Battery Pack

Worked great with my iPod and the iPhone uses the same cable. In a pinch you can also recharge off your notebook battery via USB.

I lost respect for Clarke when he began to attach his name to low-quality projects that were mainly written by another writer--such as the Rama sequels written by Gentry Lee which were full of puerile and un-Clarke-like sex scenes--and when he began milking the 2001 universe. I mean, 2010 was alright, but 2061 was fluff and 3001 was unspeakably awful and pointless (and, from the Amazon reviews, it looks like a lot of people agree).

http://www.amazon.com/Shellcoders-Handbook-Discove ring-Exploiting-Security/dp/047008023X/ref=pd_bbs_ 1/102-1300408-6806538?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=11836941 54&sr=8-1

Buy, read, learn.

Tons of ways. One of the most common and easily explained is a denial of service attack. People tend to think that DoS just means hammering the line into submission; it's a broader topic than that. If that kernel memory leak can be triggered by any outside signal, then anyone who wants to bring that box down just needs to trigger it over and over until the box has run out of RAM and swap. On a high speed network, that can often be done shockingly quickly - on the order of tens of minutes, occasionally faster.

If you're interested in these things, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is read a good operating system book - in my opinion you're best off with either Tanenbaum or Silberschatz - those books describe these problems in detail in terms of debugging your work, but in many cases, compromising a system is about leveraging unfixed bugs (enbugging, if you'll pardon the coining;) as such, a book meant to teach one to fix these is a great way to learn what needs to be protected against, as well as why.

Tons of ways. One of the most common and easily explained is a denial of service attack. People tend to think that DoS just means hammering the line into submission; it's a broader topic than that. If that kernel memory leak can be triggered by any outside signal, then anyone who wants to bring that box down just needs to trigger it over and over until the box has run out of RAM and swap. On a high speed network, that can often be done shockingly quickly - on the order of tens of minutes, occasionally faster.

If you're interested in these things, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is read a good operating system book - in my opinion you're best off with either Tanenbaum or Silberschatz - those books describe these problems in detail in terms of debugging your work, but in many cases, compromising a system is about leveraging unfixed bugs (enbugging, if you'll pardon the coining;) as such, a book meant to teach one to fix these is a great way to learn what needs to be protected against, as well as why.

That is true.

(and, no, there is no affiliate link there... just happened to be the first link on Google)

If you're gonna post a link to explosives information, why not go for the bible (The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives ), not some retard's "cookbook".

Sounds like it could be a slogan for Louis Rich: "We put the Turk in Turkey!"

Ant colonies sound a lot like slashdot it seems...

Somebody mod parent up. Then mod me up for mentioning that the basis for all of this is covered in Chapter 3 of Mr. Fowler's Analysis Patterns.

Single-sided, POSIX comes out to less than 16 feet, .NET System to 40 feet.

Actually, I checked today. It's double-sided, but the binders themselves add thickness. An unbound set comes out to ~8 inches, and that works out to (8.5*11)/(3*5)*(2*8 inches/12 inches per foot) or ~8.3 feet of 3.5 cards, or about 1/5 of .NET. (And about three feet of POSIX would be devoted to the introduction, definitions, utilities (like tar, compress, vi, and such), and rationales.)

And .NET System contains System.Windows.Forms (i.e. pretty much everything you need for a GUI app in Windows), it includes an XML parser, it includes all kinds of web libraries.

As I've pointed out, the POSIX spec covers pretty much an entire operating system and environment with attendant utilities sufficient to run a business on. But you're right, I wasn't correct regarding what .NET "System" contained, so the comparison is not entirely fair.

So, let's even it up. Add another 6 feet to POSIX for the GUI stuff. Now POSIX+GTK (thoroughly documented) comes out to ~14.5 feet, or just over 1/3 of a sketchily-documented .NET.

Of course the metric here isn't totally scientific. But we know that Windows is just more complex than Linux or other POSIX-style systems. My overarching point was... let's see, what was it again... ah, yes, here it is:

"The Windows API is huge, complex, only occasionally and accidentally orthogonal, and in my experience mostly very poorly documented. I'm not the only one who thinks so... The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone all of them."

Check out Michael Crichton's Prey http://www.amazon.com/Prey-Michael-Crichton/dp/006 1015725. Very entertaining; inspired me to actually learn about swarming behavior (flock, spread out, etc.) and programming such things into robots...