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Being overly concerned with what SHE thinks is the optimal situation during sex is why many men find themselves at women's mercy when it comes to expressing themselves sexually. As this is Slashdot, I don't expect much different, but... well... There are better ways...
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http://www.datinggurubrad.com/
http://www.realsocialdynamics.com/
The Game

In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.

And a damned good thing, too. A democracy is three wolves and two sheep voting on what's for dinner. A republic, restrained by constitutional protections of individual rights, is quite different.

Ce depend. This is true if you look at democracy as being tyranny of the masses. I'd prefer to look at it as Alexis de Tocqueville did when he wrote Democracy in America .

If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of EE design outside of PICs and microprocessors, Hambley was my text book for several of my undergraduate classes. It will tell you everything you wanted to know (and some stuff you didn't) about MOSFET/BJT physics and design.

For a more info and practice with more basic stuff (resistor networks, AC and DC fundamentals, etc) try Robbins and Miller. I used this one throughout my first year.

Most of my Optoelectronics senior project was design work from Hambley. Bounce a laser off a window into a home made phototransistor, two gains stages, one push-pull amplifier stage, and you get a fully functional laser snooping device. Nothing like listening in on the professors in their offices.

If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of EE design outside of PICs and microprocessors, Hambley was my text book for several of my undergraduate classes. It will tell you everything you wanted to know (and some stuff you didn't) about MOSFET/BJT physics and design.

For a more info and practice with more basic stuff (resistor networks, AC and DC fundamentals, etc) try Robbins and Miller. I used this one throughout my first year.

Most of my Optoelectronics senior project was design work from Hambley. Bounce a laser off a window into a home made phototransistor, two gains stages, one push-pull amplifier stage, and you get a fully functional laser snooping device. Nothing like listening in on the professors in their offices.

And, when you've tinkered enough and want to learn how things like transistors *really work* (instead of just plugging together building blocks you've found elsewhere: Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics" is the canonical guide/desk reference. It's pretty enjoyable reading if you like this sort of thing.

This book was based off the one-semester course Physics 123 taught at Harvard. In the course itself, which is taken by people of all majors, you design and build all kinds of things like radio receiver and transmitters, amps, filters, and after maybe 4-5 weeks you actually design and build a circuit to take an audio signal, figure out a way to transmit it via infrared diodes, receive it with infrared photodiodes across the room, and rebuild the audio structure and play back on a speaker. This was satisfactorily done in the class by psychology majors with absolutely no prior electronic or much physics background. If they can do it, you can.

The second half of the book (and the course) is digital electronics, culminating in the building of a 68008 digital computer with a motherboard-based breadboard. People have gone on to add things such as putting two DACs and feeding the output to an oscilloscope to draw pictures, and programming the CPU to make a PacMan game, for example. Really wild stuff.

The book is awsome, it starts with resistors, then capacitors, and goes on to transistors, and then op-amps, going from ideal to real-world structures. And you really only need some high-school level algebra to follow it. The reading is not dry at all, the authors actually make it interesting to read.

The only criticism I ever heard about this book was by a guy with a masters in Electrical Engineering who commented that one of their circuits wouldn't work in the high-Megahertz range and was a faulty design, and said much of their stuff isn't high-end design. This guy has a masters degree, and spent 6 years of education taking advanced EE courses, so if that's his critique of the book then you can bet that for people trying to go from nothing to complicated systems it's a great book.

He added, "I've been pulling for Microsoft..." - I never thought I'd see a sentence start from Carmack with that.

Actually, he's been on Microsoft's side ever since Quake in 1996 or so. David Kushner's book, Masters of Doom talks just a little about their partnership. After Doom II's major success, Microsoft saw the chance to push id to support it's Windows platform. The original Quake was released for DOS, but later a WinQuake version was released that worked using everything from DirectX except Direct3D. Carmack has released for Windows first ever since.

Carmack isn't necessarily tied to a specific platform or operating system, but he never was anti-Microsoft. He was more of a Free Software advocate than anything else.

Depending on how sophisticated your education needs get, "Electronic Circuits" by Tietze and Schenk may be worthwile:
http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Circuits-Handbook -Design-Application/dp/3540004297/sr=8-1/qid=11685 10366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-9488728-1526850?ie=UTF8& s=books
It is a college-level textbook that focuses on the application of electronic circuits. Some advanced mathematics are required, but usually the modelling is on the simple side rather than trying to capture all the fine details.
Overall I consider it a highly useful book for designing everyday electronics. People who are working on cutting-edge technology might want something (even ;-) more scientific.

Katherine Sierra is an excellent author. I used http://www.amazon.com/Certified-Programmer-310-055 -Certification-Guides/dp/0072253606/ and highly recommend it. Great at explaining basic Java concepts also.

TBH, you either love or hate the Head First books.

Ah, but you're wrong. I love the girls on the cover of the books, it's the rest of the book I don't like :-)

TBH, you either love or hate the Head First books.

Ah, but you're wrong. I love the girls on the cover of the books, it's the rest of the book I don't like :-)

Actually this post is wrong: the recent use of "iPhone" dates back over a year. There's a Linksys iPhone that was available as early as November 2005. (Linksys is owned by Cisco.)

It still could have been named with a thought to creating a conflict with a potential Apple name, but that's at least no longer obviously the case.

...it's a very recent product

Actually I take that back... there's a Linksys iPhone that was available as early as November 2005.

Read this if you haven't already:

http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-S paceship/dp/0805059857

Very interesting book. One of the interesting tidbits was they figured out that an Orion burning out of *orbit* would result in significant fallout at ground level--enough so that they could estimate the additional number of cancer deaths--and this was one reason among many why the thing never got built. To be safe to Earth-bound life, Orion would have be launched from the Moon (how to build one *on* the Moon is left as an exercise for the reader :).

Barnes and Noble is selling this book for $44.99, but Amazon.com is only selling it for $31.04!
 
Save yourself $13.95 by buying the book here: Ajax Design Patterns. That's a total savings of 31.01%!

The review links to B & N, but it seems that Amazon has it considerably cheaper (see the "Used and new..." listings). Why does Slashdot consistently link to an online store that is one of the most expensive around?

My initial reaction was 550 Watts? "teh overkils!!" However, my personal experience living in the hurricane Belt (Mobile, AL & Pascagoula, MS) has taught me: 1. resupply can take weeks, not days 2. even if its available, it may not be possible or realistic to get fuel. So, a larger battery bank that could sustain say 3 days of low wattage power is not unrealistic. and 550W is going to be needed to recharge a decent size bank. http://www.bigfrogmountain.com/powerconsumption.cf m to calulate your expected power consumption. Don't forget to add cell phone chargers, task lighting etc to the load. One of the best texts I have read that you'll find relevant is actually inside of a marine electrical manual, aimed at sailors who spend days if not weeks without much by way of power generation other than the alternator on their auxiallry engine and / or solarpanels or a windmill type generator. http://www.amazon.com/Boatowners-Mechanical-Electr ical-Manual-Calder/dp/0713672269/sr=8-1/qid=116845 1812/ref=sr_1_1/002-7781348-0185606?ie=UTF8&s=book s

He's wrong anyway. Current warming is far more pronounced in the northern hemisphere. (Citing The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air About Global Warming , but I can't remember whose research Michaels was quoting, and I don't have the book with me.)

Look at this:

http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-One-World-Not-T hought/dp/1842930958

I've just finished this book, it deals with the (supposedly very ancient) origin of the two systems, and both are geodesic, that is to say, both are derived from the measure of the polar circumference of the planet.

Cheers,

D.

... allows the federal government to do exactly what the Germans are doing as long as the government specifies that the records they are requesting relate to a counter-terrorism investigation.

On top of that, the orders are granted in ex-parte hearings and entities who are served with a Section 215 order (i.e. a library, phone company, etc.) are sworn to secrecy by law, which means that targets may never even know they are being investigated.

Governments seem to believe that seizing the records of X people who match a certain criteria is no different than seizing the records of X people they knew about a priori, which is total bullshit.

If anyone's more interested in this topic, I strongly recommend "Terrorism and the Constitution" by David Cole and James X. Dempsey.

Funny. I could have sworn that the inability to display the movie on my "yet-to-be-released disc" with my "yet-to-be-released OLD hardware" while running my "yet-to-be-released OS"(3 weeks ain't much) was fairly newsworthy here at /.

Please forgive us all for discussing such futuristic fantasies.

Funny. I could have sworn that the inability to display the movie on my "yet-to-be-released disc" with my "yet-to-be-released OLD hardware" while running my "yet-to-be-released OS"(3 weeks ain't much) was fairly newsworthy here at /.

Please forgive us all for discussing such futuristic fantasies.

Capacitors are generally used for filters and timing circuits... ... or some USB port hardware runs 15 times as fast, but I'd say that I'll never notice either with this getup.

Capacitors can indeed be used for timing circuits, but elco's will not normally be used for anything precise. They are way unaccurate (read: +100%/-50%), have aging etc. Theis only advantage is their high (but unsure) capacitance and low price. For any precise application, ceramic or better will be used. Horowitz and Hill (a bible of electronics) call their performance "terrible", "ghastly" and "awful".

Actually, you want distance from the walking dead, so .22-caliber rifles are considered superb weapons as long as they're in good shape and you're not firing from too far away. They're lightweight, low recoil, you can carry hundreds of rounds without much effort, and the rounds bounce around in the head a couple of times (if they pierce). Baseball bats and axes are last resorts, because if you have to use them, you've let them get too close. It's all spelled out in the Zombie Survival Guide.

Irrelevant to the real world? Hmmm... I suppose one's definition of "real" depends on the limitations of one's experience, but a clearer understanding of what is and is not possible in principle should surely be recognized as relevant by anyone interested. Maybe you really just aren't. Studies of intractability in computability do not only show where the boundaries lie, but can be helpful and save time in practical ways. In the context of security, I've personally seen halting concerns arise in turing-complete grammar extensions to regular expression engines, for example. Ever heard of a DoS attack? You wouldn't want a devious user to trigger one of those on your modded PCRE engine, so what's the best prefilter/dectector? Doh! There isn't one! Good thing that expensive CS education helped to steer us clear of that pitfall. Why aren't there any good sendmail configuration security checkers? Answer. Honestly, there are an infinitude of real, practical examples. You need to check out Garey&Johnson's Classic, at least the introduction. :-)

uh... splint? Now you're just being silly on purpose.

Make it out of cheese? Talk about an irrelevancy.

Poor Russell and Gödel and Turing and Post and Church and Rice and .... All those mental masturbators! What wasted lives!

That's far from the most important. There's undocumented IPC that's faster than others, functions for getting system information and more. There's several books on this, this is the gold standard for one set of the APIs. Note that this book *alone* covers several hundred calls, and it's not complete.

And Office (as of at least 2003, don't know about 2007) uses undocumented functions. Compare the import tables of the executable and DLLs to the libraries provided with the SDK and the export tables of the system DLLs. I don't know what these functions do, but they're linked in.

It makes one wonder why the Linux mascot is a Penguin?

Such things do exist--there are some free resources online as well as books that one can buy.

Free data model collections:
http://www.databasedev.co.uk/data_models.html
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/

Books:
A guy named Len Silverston has made this his niche--he's written these books:
"The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 1: A Library of Universal Data Models for All Enterprises"
"The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 2: A Library of Data Models for Specific Industries"

More about them on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&ind ex=books&field-author=Len%20Silverston&page=1
Or check this out:
http://www.univdata.com/book.htm (univdata.com is Silverston's company).

Another book (Silverston co-authored): "The Data Model Resource Book: A Library of Logical Data and Data Warehouse Designs " http://www.amazon.com/Data-Model-Resource-Book-War ehouse/dp/0471153648

If you want a free taste of what Silverston is about, here's an article he did with a data model for clickstream analysis:
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId= 4479
And this is a more general article on universal data models that he wrote:
http://www.tdan.com/i010fe04.htm

Such things do exist--there are some free resources online as well as books that one can buy.

Free data model collections:
http://www.databasedev.co.uk/data_models.html
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/

Books:
A guy named Len Silverston has made this his niche--he's written these books:
"The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 1: A Library of Universal Data Models for All Enterprises"
"The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 2: A Library of Data Models for Specific Industries"

More about them on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&ind ex=books&field-author=Len%20Silverston&page=1
Or check this out:
http://www.univdata.com/book.htm (univdata.com is Silverston's company).

Another book (Silverston co-authored): "The Data Model Resource Book: A Library of Logical Data and Data Warehouse Designs " http://www.amazon.com/Data-Model-Resource-Book-War ehouse/dp/0471153648

If you want a free taste of what Silverston is about, here's an article he did with a data model for clickstream analysis:
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId= 4479
And this is a more general article on universal data models that he wrote:
http://www.tdan.com/i010fe04.htm

My other point is that it is virtually impossible to design an application when there are more than a few people all wanting to 'help' design.

I disagree. And I'd bet what you really mean is "I don't know how to..." not, "It is virtually impossible to..." Unless you have some mathematical proof that I'm unaware of.

You simply don't get as coherent a product if you have a team of designers all trying to push their agenda.

Yes. If you have a bunch of people trying to push agendas, that would be bad. What if you instead had a whole team that shared one agenda: the making of a great product? That's how I spend my days, and it works well for us.

Novels are typically written by one person (although chromatic's right, it's more "one primary person with a lot of collaboration" from what I've seen). But there are much more collaborative creative works. With my own eyes I've seen ensemble theater pieces with substantial creative input from a dozen people. Improvisational theater groups regularly produce extended coherent works with no central control. And I understand improvisational music works similarly.

For more information on this, see the excellent book Artful Making.

Although this would probably mean a huge downscaling of the software industry, as everyone would just write their own applications.

I doubt it. Take the example you mentioned, the printing press. There are now millions of people with the basic skills and material circumstances necessary to write and lay out a book and have it printed. How many do? And of those, how many write good ones? And how few write great ones?

Actually, there is humor in Knuth. If you look up "Infinite recursion" in the index, you'll get a cross reference, to "Recursion, Infinite". Needless to say, that second entry is also a cross-reference.

Despite my sober attitude, I've been known to sneak in a bit of sly humor into my technical writing. In my last book (OK, my only book that wasn't an anonymous manual), I managed to work a reference to Alphonse and Gaston into a discussion of deadlock. There's also a reference to Dragon Ball that so far nobody seems to have spotted.

But to do that sort of thing professionally, you have to be sly so it comes in under the radar and doesn't distract. Which only makes the joke that much funnier!

I just bought a guitar, but I'm going to return it because I think it should just produce the music I want to hear when I hammer at it like a retarded orangutang.

[sarcasm]Because lines of code per hour is such a *great* metric for productivity.[/sarcasm]

Technically, with certain C compilers I can write entire programs on a single "line" of code. Please tell me how productive I am, then?
PHB's who measure productivity by lines of code/hr. get what they deserve. (Clue: it isn't nice).

Here. You're welcome.

Parent is a referral spammer, this is the link you are looking for!

Starfleet Command 2 http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Starfleet-Command- Empires/dp/B00004TSX7/ref=pd_sim_vg_1/002-4057135- 8454451 was an excellent Star Trek game. Of course it helped that it was based on an already fully-fleshed out pen and paper wargame called Starfleet Battles

It's currently $79.99 at Amazon. Free shipping and most likely no sales tax too. Why you would pay more to the overcharging manufacturer is beyond me. Stuff is always* cheaper at Amazon.



* For values of always approaching damn near most of the time, but not quite always.

B&N has it for $23.99, but Amazon.com is selling it for only $20.69! Save yourself some money by buying it here.

While for some reason the review links to B & N, it seems Amazon has it significantly cheaper (look at the "Used and new..." listings).

#1

Transcode 360 is available for Vista here: http://runtime360.com/2006/12/12/new-blood-and-tra nscode-360-for-vista-released/

Works so far. It isn't perfect to (seeking is a bitch, but it works somewhat). If you just watch & pause, there are no problems.

#2 The remote isn't 125 US$. I really do wonder where you looked, or at what product you looked.
See here: http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Universal-Media-Rem ote/dp/B000B6MLSM/ref=acc_access_vg_ai_7_title/103 -0982751-6499833

25 US$. Expensive, but okay.

#3 Yes, kinda sucks. Have the same problem.

When what you know about it comes from some other source than the media?

Here is an interesting film

• Design by contract
• Implement scientifically [so you design a correctness proof with the software.]
• Formally verify your software.
• make many real test cases and test them
• Fuzz test your software

Oh, and if you find anyone who's actually writing software that way, let me know, I may want a job there.

Skepticism is the lazy person's default position. I think for most global warming skeptics, the desire not to do anything different came first, and the skepticism was reached through a chain leading from "I don't want to have to do anything" back to "this is why I don't have to do anything."

I can't speak for everyone, but this is not true in my case. I believed the prophets of doom and gloom until 1990, when I met Sherwood Idso in a completely unrelated context. I have great respect for the man, and would stake my life on the claim that he is doing good science, not shilling for an industry. Swayed by his findings, I have since followed the debate and the science quite closely. I've been anything but lazy, thank you very much. I have come to identify strongly with the "skeptic" side of the argument.

I recently read The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming, and found it to be a good, readable summary of the hard science that questions the current paradigm. I'd like to suggest that you go read it, and then come back and refute the actual science.

But you won't, will you? I haven't seen it happen yet.

I don't think anyone should be having a discussion like this about Sealand without referencing The Mouse that Roared .

If you look at the three branches in the top RHS of the tree in figure 1, you will see three brances labeled, "plants", "animals" and "fungi". I and many others were taught in an early 70's high school that all life could be classified as belonging to one of those three branches, bacteria were explained as single celled members of one of the 3 branches, one example we were given was an ameboa [sic?] was like an animal because "it hunts other single cell critters and eats them" and they had a B&W movie to demonstrate it. I don't claim that it was correct but it's what I was taught at the time.

I first realised the tree was bigger in the early 90's, a documentry explained the lifecycle of slime mold complete with timelapse sequences showing off it's plant, animal and fungal features, but still, that was only four branches in my layman's version of the tree. A few years later I read a book about how "Alvin" the submersible had expanded the tree with the weird and wonderfull critters that live around deep sea vents and gave a picture similar to figure 1. I've also heard of other branches that extract energy from uranium 2km below ground and still others that live on the cooling rods of nuclear reactors.

Maybe none of this is news to you, but it was to me when I heard it so I thought I would pass it on. Speaking of passing things on, here is an animation you might enjoy. It's from a group of Havard microboligists showing the workings of a single cell, the animation is set to music so it's up to you if you want to reasearch what is happening. I thought I knew a little bit about cells assembling protiens and such until I saw that video on the news and was awe struck by the sheer complexity of natures nano-machines that have somehow got together and decided to build a pile of temporarily cooperative atoms capable of contemplating it's own navel, (ie: "me").

All religion is inherently a bad thing, even when "good" things are done in it's name, because it is based on a falsehood, i.e., a superstitious belief in the supernatural

Have you never heard of the field of philosophy of religion? In it theists outnumber atheists considerably, and atheists tend to go over to the other side, as Anthony Flew famously did a couple of years ago. General theism is extremely defensible by reason, and Richard Swinburne has of late proposed a number of arguments for specifically Christian concepts that are presenting quite a challenge to his atheist colleagues. See his The Coherence of Theism (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 1993) on general theistic arguments, and The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford University Press, 2003) for his tour de force application of the Bayesian theorem to Christian claims.

All religion is inherently a bad thing, even when "good" things are done in it's name, because it is based on a falsehood, i.e., a superstitious belief in the supernatural

Have you never heard of the field of philosophy of religion? In it theists outnumber atheists considerably, and atheists tend to go over to the other side, as Anthony Flew famously did a couple of years ago. General theism is extremely defensible by reason, and Richard Swinburne has of late proposed a number of arguments for specifically Christian concepts that are presenting quite a challenge to his atheist colleagues. See his The Coherence of Theism (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 1993) on general theistic arguments, and The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford University Press, 2003) for his tour de force application of the Bayesian theorem to Christian claims.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads [sic] you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it.

...there are guidelines at the local station level, the network level and the parent company level. So even if the inciting of violence and hate speech is ignored by the FCC, the continued violent rhetoric has been, and continues to be, approved at the station level (KSFO) the group level (KGO-KSFO) the company level (ABC Radio) and the parent company level (Disney). They are ALL aware of this speech, and because they have not acted in a meaningful way, they all are giving approval for it to continue.

It was lost in about 100 AD when the Church started killing those who didn't agree with the viewpoints of those in power.

The factual errors in your post just cry out for more correction. You write of "the Church" doing various things, and identify this Church with Christianity. However, by the beginning of the second millennium, Christianity was not a single organization. The split of the Oriental Orthodox after the Council of Chalcedon, the existence of Nestorian groups in East Asia out of contact with the West, and the Great Schism between the Orthodox Church and Rome in the eleventh century all served to make it difficult to claim any sort of generalization about Christianity. The examples in your post must be specified as relating mainly to the Roman Catholic Church.

Please, for pete's sake take a look at a common reference like the Oxford History of Christianity that any decent library is sure to have.

Vista still has all the games and applications people use, most not available on any version of OS X.