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You're already very familiar with OOP. If you're like me and just want the facts in hurry, I'd recommend something like C# Essentials: http://www.amazon.com/C-Essentials-2nd-Ben-Albahar i/dp/0596003153/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-5749589-837266 3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174093734&sr=8-1

It covers the language as quickly as anything I've seen. I felt fairly up-to-speed after a long weekend with this book. It won't waste your time telling you how to code "hello world" or giving you architectual guidance (there's plenty of that online). It's cheap too.

Your biggest hurdle will be learning the .Net framework libraries and getting proficient will other aspects/pitfalls of .Net development. The language itself will be easy for you.

I do so beg your imperial smugness' pardon for being so unworthy and actually having fucking work to do.

I'm taking a C# class now and the book we use is pretty good. Beginning Visual C# 2005 Of course, I'm not familiar with any other books on the subject, but my professor picked this one out of a whole bunch, so he must have had a reason!

"Get the Gang of Four, and other books on O-O like Holub on Patterns."

Two others.

The Nature of Software and the Laws of Software Process (seriously)

Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design: A Brain Friendly Guide to OOA&D (For those having trouble grokking OOP)

BTW GOF and Holub are about patterns, not just OOP.

"Get the Gang of Four, and other books on O-O like Holub on Patterns."

Two others.

The Nature of Software and the Laws of Software Process (seriously)

Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design: A Brain Friendly Guide to OOA&D (For those having trouble grokking OOP)

BTW GOF and Holub are about patterns, not just OOP.

I liked this one: Design Patterns in C#

Though it isn't a primer (obviously, given the title) it does contain quite a bit of good information. The author was responsive to my email inquiries about it as well.

Get the Gang of Four, and other books on O-O like Holub on Patterns.

Don't bother with books aimed purely at C#. If you know OO well, you can appreciate other languages too. I recently went from coding C# to Java for the first time, with very little change of pace, simply because the tools, APIs, syntax and general patterns are so similar. I'd expect the same from C/C++, because the C# syntax is both similar and simpler. In particular, context-completion features with popup help in IDEs mean that I very rarely refer to the docs anymore. VB6 used to pop up just the method signatures, with VS2005 and Eclipse, a short description of the routine pops up as well.

But grokking OO after being a procedural programmer for a long time is the hardest mental hurdle to jump. I worked with a bunch of VB6 programmers who just didn't get it, even though the language supports polymorphism reasonably well. Since I left they've transitioned to C# - I hope they had a major epiphany, because if not, they have a lot of big, static classes with very large methods hanging around.

Yes, that is very good too, praise the lord! But ask yourself, how can bible help you when your beloved project manager is shouting developers, developers, developers and you suddenly find yourself in path of flying furniture's? I can say that praising lord doesn't do a squad. But alas, help is on a way! For all those miserable souls who don't mind giving their soul in exchange of dark forces of hell, there is the Necromancer Bible. Unfortunately Amazon doesn't carry this item currently. So what to do in a mean time? Well, one could start from The Anarchist Cookbook and show those bastard colleagues on how object class hierarchy should be done. Nothing really starts the day better than seeing your office go way high into the sky and dropping down.

I can recomend the Holy Bible (King James Version, leather bound):
http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Giant-Print-Personal-L ibrary/dp/0834003511/ref=ed_oe_h/002-6705002-67456 10
to help absolve your sins, my son...

Somebody has to pay the tractor loan.

last I read the Yellowstone Super Volcano becomes active every 600000 years or so. Sure it has been about 650000 years since that happened last so we are in for a good one soon...but relative to human time scale this is not likely to be tomorrow...or next month...or anytime in the next several millennia for that matter.

*cough* sensationalist media *cough*

For a great history of scratch, check out the documentary Scratch.

I'm been a fan of scratch technology ever since DJ Qbert made the album Wavetwisters completely from scratch, and later made the animated film Wavetwisters from scratch. Now they're making the internet from scratch technology. Which makes sense -- in my mind, scratching is basically analog computation.

For a great history of scratch, check out the documentary Scratch.

I'm been a fan of scratch technology ever since DJ Qbert made the album Wavetwisters completely from scratch, and later made the animated film Wavetwisters from scratch. Now they're making the internet from scratch technology. Which makes sense -- in my mind, scratching is basically analog computation.

Sorry, you're right I grabbed the wrong link. Color me red. Regardless of whether or not there are mistakes being made there are many HD-DVD titles which are listed as having region coding on them. Most HD-DVD players have the ability to update their firmware too (hackable?). So, I am beginning to believe that there are region codes in the media regardless of whehter the players honor it or not.

The right one does list the HD-DVD as region 1, I'm confused how we both found differing links on the same site... I'm linking to the Tokyo Drift version of the film on HD-DVD now rather than the DVD version. It's not just Amazon listing this title as region 1 in the US on HD-DVD though, there are other sites with it listed the same way. There are also some UK sites like SendIt that have all their HD-DVDs listed as region 2.

Yes, there's talk about creating a region code for HD-DVD, but currenlty NO HD-DVD has a region code on it. None. (yes, Amazon has incorrectly pulled data from their regular DVDs and listed them as region codes for some HD-DVD, but that info is incorrect -- if you look at the HD-DVD version of Tokyo Drift, it says that the region code is unknown: http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Furious-HD-DVD/dp/B000G W8OAA/ref=sr_1_1/102-7175168-2871323?ie=UTF8&s=dvd &qid=1173973889&sr=1-1 )

Waterproof Bags: Make sure you have at least one waterproof bag to keep all your electronics inside within your backpack. This way, if your backpack gets soaked, since most of them are not entirely waterproof, your electronics will be safe.

GPS Trackstick: This is a nifty, tiny little device that tracks every single step you take, your altitude, speed, everything at whatever interval you choose. Decent battery life: even on the fastest recording interval setting (5 secs) you get a full days worth. It plugs right into your USB port and then the program converts the waypoints into Google Earth and overlays the paths you took on the satellite data. Works on two AAA batteries. Really fucking cool for checking out your hikes on satellite data. Needs to have line of sight (meaning as long as no metal or thickass shit's in between it and the sky it'll get signal -- so having it inside somewhere near the top of your pack is fine) You can purchase one here or alternatively there's another model here that I haven't tried but sounds more promising since they hint it doesn't have to have direct line of sight with the sky (aka can be mounted under a car).

Extra Camera Batteries: You'll need these if you have a digital camera. In some countries electricity access can be few and far between.

USB Thumb Drive: Great for storing data, documents, etc. I keep a backup scan of my passport and vital information on one in my pack secured using TrueCrypt.

Load it with portable versions of applications like Tor, Firefox, Gaim, Gimp, Open Office, and so forth. Lots of countries censor the internet and you might need a tool that allows you to get around the blocks.

Many of the computers at internet cafe's are riddled with viruses and spyware. This is why you use portable Firefox instead of the spyware riddled IE loaded by default on the machines. It may not protect you much more, but it's better than the alternative.

This bit is very important: Try and get a USB Thumbdrive that has some sort of write protection switch on it (if that exists) so that you can make sure no data can be erased from it. Make sure when you use USB card-readers or plug your digital camera into a computer to offload photos to a website or something that you SWITCH ON WRITE-PROTECT on the memory card first.

I've lost everything on my USB drive and and 2GB worth of irreplacable photos from my memory card due to virus's that erase everything on any inserted media instantly and load a self-replicating virus on in the data's place. I've since made practices like I described here a habit I never forget.

Getting burned like that hurts. Don't make the same mistake yourself.

Fast And The Furious, The: Tokyo Drift (HD-DVD) is region code 1. You're wrong. While most HD-DVDs are currently "all region" discs that won't last for long. The current Toshiba hardware isn't checking region codes but there certainly are region codes in the media and it will become standard.
The DVD Steering Committee is making every effort to include region coding in the next HD-DVD standard too.

Unfortunately for the early adopters, HD-DVD is a format that is going to die quickly. Sony has seen to that already. This also shows when you look at Amazon sales figures. The top eight selling HD-DVDs are not selling as well as the top eight Blu-Ray discs. Sorry to say, but your format was dead before it took off. HD-DVD is the Beta of this decade.

No, use gaffer tape instead: it's just as strong (fabric based), repositionable, reusable and doesn't leave nasty glue residues on everything it touches.

I picked up a FotoChute from Amazon for around $60 (it looks like they had it mismarked). It works, though I think better backup solutions are available for the same price range. I've had some issues with it being rather flakey and it requires an external flash reader if you don't plug the camera into it (and it's *very* picky about those). It basically behaves like a small external USB drive but can also back up your camera by plugging the USB cable from your camera into the drive.

For the price range, a Wolverine might be better, though I haven't used one of those. Do some research before buying.

I picked up a FotoChute from Amazon for around $60 (it looks like they had it mismarked). It works, though I think better backup solutions are available for the same price range. I've had some issues with it being rather flakey and it requires an external flash reader if you don't plug the camera into it (and it's *very* picky about those). It basically behaves like a small external USB drive but can also back up your camera by plugging the USB cable from your camera into the drive.

For the price range, a Wolverine might be better, though I haven't used one of those. Do some research before buying.

Richard Swinburne, the foremost living philosopher of religion and an orthodox Christian, is one of a number of theist philosophers who hold that God is everlasting, that is, existing yesterday, today, and tomorrow, as opposed to timeless, that is, existing outside of time and being knowing for sure the future deeds of agents with free will. Check out his book Is There a God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), his introduction to his thought for laymen.

Yes, sir. I opted for the crank one instead though. It shines for hours over minutes. It looks a lot like this one, and the radio like this. Great emergency tools to have either way. I used my crank flashlight on an overnight crickedy old train ride from Shanghai to Beijing last year - perfect for reading and playing shadow puppets.

Yes, sir. I opted for the crank one instead though. It shines for hours over minutes. It looks a lot like this one, and the radio like this. Great emergency tools to have either way. I used my crank flashlight on an overnight crickedy old train ride from Shanghai to Beijing last year - perfect for reading and playing shadow puppets.

Oops, my bad. I just copied the link from my bookmarks. :)

Here's the Amazon link to the watch. And it's got almost the same set as features as the 70T-7V (difference being that this one is in Titanium).

First time I went abroad, I brought all sorts of gadgets with me: a mini-television to watch all the exotic foreign shows (before I understood the difference between NTSC, NTSC-J and PAL), a MiniDisc recorder to take "audio" photos of different places (worked out nicely), a laptop to "do work" (ended up using it as a glorified travel diary). The camera was low-tech film, so no worries about backing up files. I also brought a portable immersion water heater to boil noodles or make pasta.

The second time I went, I brought the heater, the camera and the minidisc recorder. The heater had adapters for nearly every kind of AC socket, so that was fine. The other two relied on batteries. The key was that they could use simple, easy-to-find batteries (AA's, primarily). I wouldn't want to be at the mercy of a rechargeable battery for anything really important because you'll have to cart around a bunch of adapters, but more importantly, if the batteries die you have to wait a number of hours before you can use your little slice of technology again. (Sorry, iPod).

The more low-tech, the higher the reliability. No-tech gadgets like travel journals (with real paper) might cramp up your hand, but at least they'll work in the middle of the jungle.

A Deepness in the Sky

Ok, since you asked, here you go. :)

Seriously, though, I think that the top selling lists on Amazon are very time sensitive. I'll put on a conspiracy hat and say that if Sony execs decided to buy a bunch Casino Royale blue ray discs, it could make that disc jump up in the rankings.

I agree wholehartedly. He wrote Behemoth (actually three books in one volume), about a group of mammoths surviving to this day. Very good stories, and very readable. And he wrote Evolution (which might be a little controversial in the US ;-) ), which is a series of linked short stories about "a day in the life of" several (distant) ancestors of homo sapiens.

I agree wholehartedly. He wrote Behemoth (actually three books in one volume), about a group of mammoths surviving to this day. Very good stories, and very readable. And he wrote Evolution (which might be a little controversial in the US ;-) ), which is a series of linked short stories about "a day in the life of" several (distant) ancestors of homo sapiens.

which was effectively a tax that the cell phone providers must collect from their customers. Most Americans are too economically illiterate to understand that though. Heck, there's $8.10 in taxes listed on my cell phone bill in addition to the hidden taxes.

I read an article about a rural cell phone company that's providing cheap phone and cellular Internet access. They can do that because the big companies weren't all that interested in serving the area and thus the feds couldn't extort much money at the spectrum auction.

A land-rush model would have worked better than an auction model for divvying up spectrum, as recommended in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Not only that, look at the stuff that's in the top 20. 2 versions of borat, 3 versions of Casino royale (including the Blu-Ray), Some diet DVD, The James Bond Box Set (I really can't see that selling to many copies at $180), and few other movies that look good, but not extraordinary. What are the actual sales numbers for Casino Royale BluRay, because it doesn't seem like it's beating anything taht I would expect to see selling more.

I remember reading the "Danny Dunn" series like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Homework-Machine-Raymond-Abr ashkin-Williams/dp/0590468901/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/002- 8587649-5217660?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173882058&sr= 8-2

However, the reading level is more like 6th grade instead of high school. But the stories had a lot of (apparently) accurate science related material. Even younger would be Encyclopedia Brown-but that's not science-orientated. Sorry, not much help for high school students.

For an all girls class, you might start with The Left Hand of Darkness.

'"Do you find it reasonable that a CD will play in all CD players

but an iTunes song will only play on an iPod"

Something that has to do with biology, politics, the environment and a lot of other interesting subjects for a high-school student.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
This is the first book in the series

I second your recommendations of KSR and Forward's books, in particular Rocheworld about the first interstellar mission with today's (or almost) technologies.

Arthur C. Clarke books are often very true to science. One of my favourites is Rendevouz with Rama . The first in a trilogy about the encounter of enormous spaceships all of a sudden found racing through our solar system.

Also Isaac Asimovs books are nice. Try starting with I, Robot , which has a much better story than the movie they made.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0060813261 /sr=8-2/qid=ARRAY(0x66d11a30)/ref=dp_image_0/002-8 166626-0307252?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&qid=117386 0727&qid=1173860727&sr=8-2

Nice Book, a eco-bio-sci-fi-thiller. Some characters are a lil bit stereotype, but all the katastrophes and scientific speculations are accurate. And it's pretty cheap.

The first time ever that the german version of the cover looks better than the UK/US one in my opinion.
http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/images/3596164532/ sr=8-1/qid=1173860930/ref=dp_image_0/302-6225487-6 896802?ie=UTF8&n=299956&s=books&qid=1173860930&sr= 8-1

There is even some newer research that is pointing to people who run a lot for distance can actually gain fat in their legs.

"Do you know who owns or controls the station you're watching? Does the truth you know rely on its funding?"

Lyrics from MDFMK - (C)ontrol?

Well, let's see... Are you the Ryan Fenton that likes to hunt with a black powder muzzle loader? ATF might be interested in putting that into your file, just for reference. Or maybe you're Ryan Fenton of Winter Haven, Florida, or hmm... seems fairly likely you might be Coach Fenton of Clifton, NY, he maintains his own webpage. A good slashdot reader kind of activity. Does the Shenendehowa school board know you are a hunter? Or maybe you are Ryan Fenton the paranormal investigator with a M.S. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Connecticut? You are probably the non-Mac Sketch Fighter fanboy and looking at your resume it looks like you probably are the Ryan from Winter Haven, Florida, with full home address and phone number given.

Now you have no idea who I am, or who anyone is reading this post, or what any of us might do with any of this information. Doesn't that make you at least a little bit uncomfortable?

The typical movie runs ninety minutes and is seen from both a physical and psychological distance.

The movies, like all theater, began as a social experience, not a solo viewing. That is not irrelevant when you are trying to assess the impact at "Psycho," "Silence of the Lambs" or a crudely exploitative, blood-soaked, teen slasher flick like "Friday The Thirteenth."

The immersive first-person shooter or RPG presents a very different set of problems. Gene Wolfe's "When I Was Ming The Merciless" Endangered Species is a must-read in this context.

The player with a copy of "Fallout" might begin by asking a deceptively simple question:

How do you respond to the presence of children in the game? Could you accept them being drawn more centrally into the story and action?

C78? No such thing. The first ANSI C standard was C89.

That's the year K&R was first published, so I assume the GP means K&R C.

Absolutely. I'm thumbing through my Hennessy & Patterson right now. If you want to understand how to design a basic CPU, I highly suggest this book as well. Within a matter of weeks, you'll be designing your own multicycle FSM in verilog. It's undergone about four or five revisions now, but I still have my first edition. It doesn't cover pipelining or multiprocessors in _great_ detail, but more than enough to get anyone familiar with the concepts. Anything by Hennessy & Patterson is a keeper!

We used to park submarines off the coast of Murmansk and tap their underwater cables. http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-E spionage/dp/006097771X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/104-15 93460-8987142?ie=UTF8&qid=1173741745&sr=1-38

In the 1980s, there was lots of debate about the existance of secret planes like the B-2 and steath fighters. Finally, one day, they showed them on CNN and said "Oh, yeah, we had this stuff in regular flight ops for 10 years.

Of course, we are kinder and genteler now, so we would never do sneaky stuff like this anymore...

Read this book and understand how useful GIS and statistics are.

I'm having trouble discerning whether this is a REALLY clever troll, someone making t3h fun-nay, or a rabid greenie.

The first two, bravo. The third? Crack a book. Notably, State of Fear by Michael Crichton.

But since the 1985 air-launch satellite intercept, a project cancelled by Congress (see "Blunt arrows: the limited utility of ASATs", The Space Review, June 6, 2005), there is no evidence that a new satellite-killer technology has been developed.

Oh no? HAARP can, according to people who work for the project, and according to the person who first showed that this project was feasible, push portions of the atmosphere into space to a sufficient degree to interrupt satellites. I found out about this from a highly paranoid documentary called HAARP: Holes in Heaven? which had a lot of unproven schlocky nonsense but also had some VERY interesting commentary from people actually currently working for the HAARP project. I won't go into it too much but the biggest cheese they had on video was cross-signaling more strongly than I've ever seen. He would be asked a question about whether the project was dangerous and he would say no, but his whole BODY would actually rock his head into a "yes" and he would be nodding. When he talked about technical issues, you could see him almost become a different person as he talked about something he believed in.

Anyway, put that aside for a moment...

The US is planning to deploy space-based weapons (including nuclear weapons) to attack other objects in space and on the ground.

The article says this is infeasible. What? That's a bunch of crap. There are two arguments given for this. One is "Even planning a space-to-space attack can take hours or days or longer for the moving attacker and target to line up in a proper position." That's only true if you have a small number of weapons, and if they don't use a laser or maser weapon. We have both laser and masers up to significant levels of power output.

The other is that it is expensive. So? Since when has the US government displayed an unwillingness to unnecessarily spend taxpayer money?

We all know that space-based weapons are possible (the soviets are well-known to have actually built killer satellites which work, and the article references this fact several times) and desirable (even if they are not effective against ground-based targets, which has never been proven, they are useful against space-based ones) so why do we think that more of them will not be built? That is patently ridiculous.

since he discovered the fastest-known algorithm for calculating pi, the one still in used today. Perhaps also noteworthy for the 65,000+ digit reciters is that only 39 places of pi are sufficient to calculate the circumference of a circle around the known universe to within the radius of a hydrogen atom. "The Man Who Knew Infinity" has more.

Amazon's ec2 is not free, but it's not expensive either. a compile farm alternative is the perfect use for ec2. you pay only for the cpu you need. so you don't have to maintain machines, virtual or otherwise, between milestones (for example).