Slashdot Mirror

One is reminded of the opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars . It takes place in a tent town where the tent is made out of a purely transparent fabric that blocks radiation while still letting light through to make it seem as if folks are living openly on the surface.

But then, what's the point of terraforming a tent town with these mirrors? You could get the same heat and light from a nuclear reactor powering strategically located lamps inside the structure. You can't terraform an open space on the surface, since any atmosphere you'd create would immediately flow into the near-vacuum that is most of the planet. I'm really scratching my head at while this idea is so clever.

This thing: http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-HS850-Bluetooth-Hea dset/dp/B0007WWAGI masses almost half an ounce more than my current cell phone, which has output power of something like .2 to .8 watt depending on conditions. What is the blue tooth headset power level anyway?

Obviously, you wouldn't put the antenna in the in-the-ear part. But you need that space for molded plastic comfort-fitting anyway. Unless you use speaker phone options and hold the phone at arm's length, you're not doing any worse than currently.

I know of too many British guys with the first name "Laurie" (not Lori). Here's a celebrity example.

That's an interesting link. There's actually another Nordic composer whose father worked for IBM, namely Magnus Lindberg and he grew up learning to turn computing power to the purposes of musical composition back when one had to hack LISP and couldn't depend on any pretty graphical interface. His computer-guided pieces like "KRAFT" or "Engine" really do sound like adoration of the raw power early hackers on timeshares felt blessed to have access to.

That's an interesting link. There's actually another Nordic composer whose father worked for IBM, namely Magnus Lindberg and he grew up learning to turn computing power to the purposes of musical composition back when one had to hack LISP and couldn't depend on any pretty graphical interface. His computer-guided pieces like "KRAFT" or "Engine" really do sound like adoration of the raw power early hackers on timeshares felt blessed to have access to.

While porn may only account for 1%, I would like to see usage of porn versus non-porn sites. While www.google.com is only one site, it shouldn't be dismissed as irrelevant.

So let's sing The internet is for Porn song. Audio sample (my apologies for the wm link)

Ron Graham was head of Math Research at AT&T Bell Labs back in the '80's. Knuth should need no introduction.

Concrete Mathematics

I wonder why there isn't a DVD install version for people who won't have access to the internet after install. That would be awfully useful in packaging for countries where fast internet access isn't a given.

I read his Infinity Concerto and found it extremely dull, overly metaphysical, and hard to finish. Strange considering that another novel of his, Legacy , was totally engrossing, and is among my favourite science fiction books ever.

You're right, the next big thing (and its happening already) is internet television, already I'm watching Amazon's Fishbowl with Bill Maher, and downloading television shows on iTunes. ABC and FOX are putting their shows online for free, while other channels are putting promo episodes online. Sony's Musicbox replaces the now-defunct MTV, and YouTube has more than replaced public television.

Now, if only international copyright laws and/or paranoia would be cleared up enough that I wouldn't need to use proxy servers to get to this content from outside the USA.

...is a great new book debunking climate change hysteria. The book brings much needed common sense to the whole discussion.

http://www.amazon.com/Unstoppable-Global-Warming-E very-Years/dp/0742551172/sr=8-3/qid=1163539112/ref =pd_bbs_sr_3/002-3491984-9562434?ie=UTF8&s=books

In a week which shall be recorded in Wikipedia infamy (and then vandalized and redirected to clitoris), the oft persecuted and never defeated internet missionaries of the Gay Nigger Association of America struck yet another powerful and telling blow against the powerful forces of bigotry and racism. Most notably, the growing zionist community on renowned internet pissing yard wikipedia.org.

And the records have indeed tumbled, with an unheard of third successful survival from the digital shitheap that is "Votes For Deletion". Coming in spite a heinous act of self promotion and cyber terrorism by Pat Gunn/Improv (formerly known as Aharon Meshenstein prior to his infiltration of the United States), who listed and inspired mob vandalism upon the GNAA's entry.

Fresh from his promotion of Wikipedia's $50,000 fundraiser for arms and supplies to the Jewish state of Israel, Improv launched a series of unprovoked and slanderous attacks against the well loved organisations leadership, all the while using foul and unholy necromancies to enlist the dead themselves to vote the entries deletion. Names such as "Wolfman" and "Demonslave" only adding to the damning list of evidence linking Mr Gunn to the occult.

Though Improv's actions gained him a small majority, a shock last minute intervention from Pope John Paul II spared the pages untimely fate, although as yet unconfirmed reports have indicated that several hundred 8-year old negro children were driven to the Basilica to secure the pontiffs support. Others point towards the black curse cast upon the deletion campaign by the support of infamous Brawl Hall mouthpiece "Yoyo" as the main driving force behind the salvation of the aforementioned entry.

But the details are likely to cause few sleepless nights among the group, only one of whom was willing to speak to the press. Namely GNAA Wikipedia contributor Popeye, who interrupted his drawing of pornography to give a brief dismissal the controversy: "Even with Improv's shady dealings, the sheer size and girth of a swollen GNAA phallus enables it both an identity and a vote of it's own. Making such discussion moot".

About Wikipedia:

Wikipedia, a content-free encyclopedia in many languages, started life in January 2001 and has already risen to the status of the internets premiere "trollpedia".

Currently Wikipedia contains 363950 articles, 10032 of which are genuine, and 343 of them factually accurate. Leaving Wikipedia on an academic par with "Star Wars: Incredible Cross-sections: The Ultimate Guide to Star Wars Vehicles and Spacecraft" and "My First Book of Animals from A to Z".

About GNAA:

GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what

In a week which shall be recorded in Wikipedia infamy (and then vandalized and redirected to clitoris), the oft persecuted and never defeated internet missionaries of the Gay Nigger Association of America struck yet another powerful and telling blow against the powerful forces of bigotry and racism. Most notably, the growing zionist community on renowned internet pissing yard wikipedia.org.

And the records have indeed tumbled, with an unheard of third successful survival from the digital shitheap that is "Votes For Deletion". Coming in spite a heinous act of self promotion and cyber terrorism by Pat Gunn/Improv (formerly known as Aharon Meshenstein prior to his infiltration of the United States), who listed and inspired mob vandalism upon the GNAA's entry.

Fresh from his promotion of Wikipedia's $50,000 fundraiser for arms and supplies to the Jewish state of Israel, Improv launched a series of unprovoked and slanderous attacks against the well loved organisations leadership, all the while using foul and unholy necromancies to enlist the dead themselves to vote the entries deletion. Names such as "Wolfman" and "Demonslave" only adding to the damning list of evidence linking Mr Gunn to the occult.

Though Improv's actions gained him a small majority, a shock last minute intervention from Pope John Paul II spared the pages untimely fate, although as yet unconfirmed reports have indicated that several hundred 8-year old negro children were driven to the Basilica to secure the pontiffs support. Others point towards the black curse cast upon the deletion campaign by the support of infamous Brawl Hall mouthpiece "Yoyo" as the main driving force behind the salvation of the aforementioned entry.

But the details are likely to cause few sleepless nights among the group, only one of whom was willing to speak to the press. Namely GNAA Wikipedia contributor Popeye, who interrupted his drawing of pornography to give a brief dismissal the controversy: "Even with Improv's shady dealings, the sheer size and girth of a swollen GNAA phallus enables it both an identity and a vote of it's own. Making such discussion moot".

About Wikipedia:

Wikipedia, a content-free encyclopedia in many languages, started life in January 2001 and has already risen to the status of the internets premiere "trollpedia".

Currently Wikipedia contains 363950 articles, 10032 of which are genuine, and 343 of them factually accurate. Leaving Wikipedia on an academic par with "Star Wars: Incredible Cross-sections: The Ultimate Guide to Star Wars Vehicles and Spacecraft" and "My First Book of Animals from A to Z".

About GNAA:

GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what

If you don't have a copy yet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a great book and a good accompaniment to Hackers.

I looked up one of my favorite CD's -- the OST to Supergirl (1984)

Here's the proof:

MusicBrainz.org link to the 23-track SILVA AMERICA release.

'Decoded' affiliate link at Amazon.com.

Non-profit or not, musicbrainz.org 'get's paid' if you buy CDs via the amazon.com affiliate links imbedded in their site.

Slashdot CAPTCHA: squash

Ironic that a .org like slashdot has to show ads to pay the bills but that is pretty much the only way they can stay on the net. I doubt their 'subscription model' makes any sort of dent in their bandwidth bills.

Barnes and Noble is selling this book for $19.96, but Amazon.com is only selling it for $16.47! Save yourself $3.49 by buying the book here: Variable Star By Heinlein and Robinson. That's a total savings of 17.48%!

A tower that long could also fall on us.

I am still troubled by the memic collision caused by the Dove Bar.

I am still troubled by the memic collision caused by the Dove Bar.

Interestingly, the same topic was covered in the book Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explore the Hidden Side of Everything. One of the authors, Steven Levitt, developed some of the tools to find cheating teachers. One of the examples I from the book was to look for strings of correct answers that were statistically significant (where the teacher would have erased quite a few of a students answers, right or wrong, and put in all right answers).

Levitt's Freakonomics does a nice piece on these same Chicago public schools studies. Here is a discussion of Levitt's ideas

CS 278. Principles of Software Engineering. The nature of software. The object-oriented paradigm.
Software life-cycle models. Requirements, specification, design, implementation, documentation,
and testing of software. Object-oriented analysis and design. Software maintenance.
Prerequisite: CS 270 or senior standing in Computer Science or Computer Engineering. FALL. [3]

CS 279. Software Engineering Project. Students work in teams to specify, design, implement,
document, and test a nontrivial software project. The use of CASE (Computer-Assisted
Software Engineering) tools is stressed. Prerequisite: CS 278. SPRING. [3]

Greg: The way you laid the book [Death By Modern Medicine] out is fantastic. You start out Chapter 1 with the title, "Death by Modern Medical Doctors." Tell us more about that?

Carolyn: A certain mentality exists in medicine where medical doctors believe they should have a monopoly on everything to do with a person's health. Anybody who does something other than treatments with drugs or surgery becomes the enemy. This mentality existed long before I became a medical doctor.

The history of modern medicine began in America with a survey that was done by Abraham Flexner. It was called the Flexner Report. Flexner was an educational reformer who was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to survey North American medical schools. Flexner had fallen in love with the German scientific model of education when he visited Berlin in 1906. He began to see this as the way to set up the North American medical education system. The German model was based on science and lab medicine using drugs, science, and treating very, very ill people.

In medical school, doctors are trained in the extremes of medicine (emergency and surgical medicine). But then when they go into practice, 80 percent of the patients have conditions that are lifestyle oriented (aches, pains, fatigue etc...). In medical school, students aren't trained in the area of diet and lifestyle.

Over the past 100 years this mentality has caused medicine to treat normal individuals with abnormal therapies -- drugs and surgeries. To me, that became the basis of the modern medical monopoly and how we have been brainwashed into thinking this is the way it should be and it's not.

I'm a naturopathic doctor as well as a medical doctor. I always held out hope that naturopathic medicine would fill in this gap. ...

-Death by Modern Medicine, emphasis added

It's really too bad our society is moving away from the free-enterprise capitalism market that made the US so great so quickly and moving towards a feel-good socialistic system.

If you mean freetrade capitalism, there's hasn't been any since the 1800s. What we have now is nothing like what Alexis de Tocqueville saw and wrote of in "Democracy in America". What we have now is the Corporate Aristocracy Thomas Jefferson warned of.

No officer of the law has ever selectively enforced a law or falsely accused someone of a crime because of religion, skin color, or opinions.

Accusations are easy, convictions actually take evidence.

I very much doubt that a bunch of white Protestants planning to blow up a airliner would get any breaks compared to a bunch of Asian Muslims planning to do the same thing in either enforcement or sentencing.

Must be a nice universe.

Before rushing to judgment, lets see how things work out in Londonistan.

One informed source I've seen estimates that the IRA had 800 active members in the early '70s. In 1972 there were about 1,800 bombings that killed about 370 people. The IRA's goal was political pressure, to get the British to leave Northern Ireland and return to the UK. As a result, it wasn't unusual for there to be a warning about a bomb 5-30 minutes before it went off, or they blew up things when people weren't there. Although there were bombings that killed large numbers of people, I don't think that the IRA was interested in mass slaughter, by and large.

The Islamist extremists, on the other hand, are ultimately waging an imperialist war against Western civilization and culture. They want to become its masters, to force the West to either convert to Islam and live under Islamic Sharia law, or to submit to Muslim rulers. They want to reform the Muslim superstate, the Caliphate, uniting church and state and governing all Muslim lands. (They understand this may take a long time, but they are prepared to do their little bit. They still seethe over losing battles 1,000 years ago, getting kicked out of Spain, etc.) If we don't convert or submit, it is their duty to kill us. That is seldom outright stated, usually the tactical goal is some complaint against US or UK forces being in this country or that, or policy supporting this government or that, but that isn't the long term goal. They also feel free to kill us as infidels. The Islamists don't make warning calls and they plan their attacks to maximize casualties. It has been revealed, for example, that Al Qaeda called off an attack using poison gas in New York subways because they weren't sure that it would kill as many people as they wanted. Look at the Bali Bombing, the 7/7 bombings, the Madrid bombing, and 9/11. That is the pattern of Islamist extremist terror: if the infidel will not bow to our demands, kill them in as large of numbers as possible. 9/11 destroyed 4 jet aircraft, a major sky scraper, heavily damaged one of the largest office buildings in the world (the Pentagon), killed ~ 3,000 people, and did $100,000,000,000 in damage to the US economy. The recently foilded attack plan in the UK was intended to bring down 10 jet aircraft full of people, killing thousands.

There are at least two times the number of Islamist extremists being watched as the IRA had at its height of 1,800 bombings in a year. The Islamists goal is to kill as many as possible per bomb. They are trying to get their campaign going.

You might find Londonistan interesting reading.

How are kids supposed to learn proper spelling & grammar?

Anyone remember "Ebonics"?

This story is overflowing with FUD and misrepresentation. A routine fact-check will demonstrate this. Let's pull this apart:

According to Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president of the Taiwan-based company, the issue is simply that the basic home edition of Vista, Home Basic, which is available for preorder on Amazon.co.uk for 154.99 pounds ($293), is so basic that users will be forced to move to Vista Home Premium, at 189.99 pounds ($359).

First of all, they got the prices of Vista wrong: Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is 185 GBP; Vista Home Premium is 224 GBP.

Second, price-conversion. Everybody knows that you don't take the street price of a product in British pounds, run it through xe.com, and come out with the street price in USD. Microsoft's MSRP on Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is $199 USD, -not- $293 as given in the article. Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $239 USD. Note that the MSRP on XP Home Edition is $199 USD, the same as Vista Home Basic.

Third, Microsoft has never sold an edition of Windows with the Media Center included on the retail market, so in a way there isn't really any good point of comparison.... of -course- it's going to be more expensive than XP Home.

"The new (Vista) experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong told PC Pro magazine. "There's no (Aero) graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."

Yeah well, guess what? some people just don't want or need that stuff. Actually, I'd hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of users don't want or need Media Center functionality or a remote control. That's not what's worth harping on about. Home Premium does have a lot of neat things in it, especially for mobile users, media centers, tablet PC owners, etc., but it's useless for a lot of people who just use their computer to get stuff done.

Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.

It's also got far more functionality (Media Center, new mobility features, XBox 360 connectivity, Tablet PC features) than XP Home Edition or Vista Home Basic Edition, the latter of which Acer is refusing to sell to its customers.

"We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less.

Quit your bitching, Mr. Wong. If the price of Windows is going up by 10% because you are choosing to force a higher edition on your customers, you pass that price increase on to users... it's not your job as a company to absorb price increases from Microsoft.

At the top of the Vista lineup is the Ultimate Edition, which can be preordered for 325 pounds ($614) and, again, is significantly more expensive than the XP operating system it replaces.

Ultimate Edition is covers a lot more ground than XP Professional. The thing comes with Media Center, twice as many games (good ones, too, like Chess and Majongg), backup software that doesn't suck, a bunch of extra software and add-ons analogous to the XP Plus! Pack, and even a friggin' UNIX stack to boot -- and that's not even going into

Maybe its just me but piping white noise into my head was as bad as listening to the server noise - and cost an additional fifty bucks.

I'm not in a country where the PS3 launches this year, so I'm going to have to use Amazon.com as a guide of PS3 launch titles (anyone got a list). From it's PS3 page ( http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-3-Games/b/ref=am b_link_822552_2/103-0758594-8567865?ie=UTF8&node=1 4210751 ) we have Full Auto 2 (sequel to a fairly bad XBox 360 game), Call of Duty 3 (out on everything else too), F.E.A.R. (ditto), Madden NFL 07 (and again), Sonic the Hedgehog (noticing a pattern?), Resistance: Fall Of Man (what? I believe we may have found a good new game!) and Need for Speed Carbon (also out for everything else under the sun). Even ignoring the fact these are mostly multi-platform, most aren't even that good...

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the XBox 360 launch lineup was good (I got most of my entertainment from PGR3, and wanted to kill everyone who recommended PDZ and Kameo), I'm just saying the PS3 lineup isn't exactly brilliant either. Now, sure, the PS3 has MGS4 and FF13 (is that right? I lose count...), but then the XBox 360 has Dead Rising and Gears of War (whether not being sequels is good or bad is left as an excercise for the reader).

Development... if the XBox 360 was difficult to code for, PS3 developers are attempting the impossible. 7 asymmetric special purpose cores with a single generic CPU core, with some really interesting CPU cache setup! It's less a hardware architecture, more a excercise is developer pain.

Online service... did XBox Live do something to offend? Sure, it's expensive/overpriced, but it's really easy to use.

What currency is that? I'm seeing multiple places quoting around $400 US http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-HD-A1-DVD-Upconverti ng-Player/dp/B000E1PTGK/

He said the kid was using a machine at a university in Sweden, not that he attended said university. Swedes can have insecure machines too, you know. Anyway, I was in university at 16, and was done with high school at 15, so it isn't that much of a stretch for this kid to be in university at 15. I could have been if I hadn't spent that year sitting around goofing off and reading Misner, Thorne and Wheeler instead.

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR-NC50-Noise-Cancelin g-Headphones/dp/B0007N55OQ/sr=8-1/qid=1163179023/r ef=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-1893536-4549558?ie=UTF8&s=elect ronics

The customer reviews pretty much sum them up - I've even got one in there. They do a FANTASTIC job at filtering out our 500 servers, with or without playing music.

I've been waiting for threading to return so I could respond to this. Parent should be modded down.

David Pogue is currently working on a Vista book. He posted about it in his blog only a month ago:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/blogging -from-microsoft/

Oh, and he's written plenty of Windows books too: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-3339995-6 640159?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david +pogue

There appears to be a bit of bias in your post.
When you leave out half of the truth you're being a little biased yourself - hopefully you're just ignorant.

He's a technology writer and he writes about what's current. Leave the bias accusations behind.

This sounds like a reasonable use for Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). See http://aws.amazon.com/s3 for more info, but it's a web service data storage solution that charges for usage ($0.15/GB/month for storage + $0.20/GB for transfer) that's redundant and scalable and allows you to store an "unlimitted" amount of data. You can take advantage of Amazon's infrastructure and avoid needing to hire people to maintain a fleet of storage servers.

The allele in question, the D version of microcephalin, was discovered by geneticist Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago. It appears to regulate the growth of fetal brain cells. If you have another allele of the gene, you end up with microcephaly, which in extreme cases causes death and in less severe cases ends up with smaller heads/brains (hence the name). If you've ever seen Howard Stern's show, the guy called "Beetlejuice" has microcephaly.

It's theorized that the D variant of microcephalin causes the fetal brain to organize slightly more rapidly and efficiently, leading to a bump in IQ. This variant seems to have appeared in either the Middle East or Europe about 37,000 years ago (hence, the newer theory about Neanderthal origin) and conferred such a genetic advantage that it has swiftly (in genetic terms) swept through the populations that had access to this allele.

70% of Europeans and East Asians now have variant D of microcephalin (not 70% of humans as was stated in the article). It is nearly non-existent in sub-Saharan Africa (many populations have none), but where there was any contact with Europeans or Asians, it has swiftly taken over (up to 25% of the population in just a few hundred years).

The standard measure of variation in human alleles is known as Wright's fixation index or FST. A value of between 5-10% should be considered "normal" within subpopulations. Higher than that, and the allele is being heavily selected for. The FST value for variant D of microcephalin is 48%, which is simply off the charts for a mutation (or introduced by cross-breeding with Neanderthals) that occurred within the last 37,000 years. This is one really important allele.

Lahn has also discovered a version of the ASPM gene that seems to have similar brain-boosting abilities that arose in Caucasian populations (Europe, the Middle East and India) about 6,000 years ago and is now found in 44% of that population. Another modified gene, found mostly in Ashkenazi Jews (Eastern European descent), also seems to significantly boost intelligence by modifying brain chemicals known as sphingolipids. It's quite a boost (27% of US Nobel prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who make up less than 3% of the US population), but its downside is severe as well (Tay-Sachs, Gaucher and Niemann-Pick diseases), indicating that the mutation is relatively recent and that the less favorable aspects of these alleles have not yet been selected out.

There are probably equivalent mutations in other populations that have boosted their intellect as well - they simply have yet to be discovered.

Most of this information is found in Nicholas Wade's excellent book Before the Dawn Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, pp. 97-99, 193, 245-256 and 271.

In the scientific literature, look for:

Patrick D. Evans et. al., "Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans", Science 209:1717-1220 (2005)

Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, "Ongoing Adaptive Evolution in ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens", Science 209:1720-1722 (2005)

Since the entire human history is a description of struggle against the tribe, village, city, country that you don't happen to belong to. Since mankind has always opted to destroy, oppress, replace steal from, exterminate any group not like them or that might possibly a competitor for what ever resource is require for survival at that stage of civilazation.... Your telling me Homo Sapiens (including our Cro Magnon parents, had sex with those hairy brutes? Ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha... HTH: http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Socie ties/dp/0393317552/sr=8-1/qid=1163040598/ref=sr_1_ 1/002-2011287-7660018?ie=UTF8&s=book/ Guns, Germs, Steel

Check out the 20th Anniversary edition, it has four new chapters.

http://www.amazon.com/Postwar-History-Europe-Since -1945/dp/0143037757/sr=8-1/qid=1163033992/ref=pd_b bs_sr_1/102-5298520-0829739?ie=UTF8&s=books

We occupied the country in 1945 with 500,000 Americans, plus over a million troops from Britian, Russia and -it was kind of a joke- France. There was a vibrant insurgency with 1,000s of combat deaths following the ceastion of hositilites in 1945. Peace wasn't declared until 1951. Although the rebuilding of the country was relatively quick because only 20% of industrial production over 1938 levels was destroyed. In Iraq, the infrastructure has been utterly destroyed over 50 years of mismanagement and 10 years of economic sanctions. What's more, Americans desperately wanted to go home then as well. We just couldn't risk West Germany slipping into Civil War with the Soviet Controlled East Germans. Roosevelt said that the Americans would stay less than 2 years --We stayed 40.

You sound like something of a nut, but I thought I would at least point out that the basis for your success criteria is silly. Just because Germany couyld police it's own borders in 2 years, doesn't mean that I raq should be able to. Afterall, Germans didn't have terrorists threatening to kill them if they actively supported the rebuilding of their country. --Well, the Eastern Germans eventually did, but that is another incredibly sad story.

And here's a link to the book minus the above spammer's referral string. They have it at WalMart, too, if you don't like firms with one-click-patents.

I found it on Amazon for about $26.06 US, which came to just under $30.00 including shipping.

Yes, the second edition. :)

This is completely true, but as I understand it's customary for people at that level to offer their resignation when things aren't going well, even (especially) if they don't expect to be taken up on it. This was in, among other things, Bob Woodward's latest book, in which he investigated Rumsfeld's persona indepth. The book was well worth the read and I actually have more respect for Rumsfeld after reading it-- at least in the sense that I realize he acts according to some plan, and not just out of pure evil.

Barnes and Noble is selling this book for $31.99, but Amazon.com is only selling it for $26.39!
 
Save yourself $5.60 by buying the book here: The Ruby Way. That's a total savings of 17.51%!

Rumsfeld has been one of the worst SecDef's of all time. Read Cobra II, the definitive history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rumsfeld micromanaged the deployment of troops to Iraq to such an extent that personnel arrived without their equipment and troops were assigned to tasks they had no training for. Rumsfeld discounted the experience of his generals, and thought that he knew more about warfighting, logistics, etc. than the people who spent their whole career training and preparing for it. He expressly forbade planning for the postwar environment. How stupid is that?! Here's an article on the web to get you started: Offense and Defense: The Battle Between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon Or you can google "Rumsfeld" and "TPFDL".

What's this, then?

Sure, you could read about it from some magazine or author of a web site, but why not skip that all and go straight to who uses the product? http://www.amazon.com/Reilly-Technologies-15759549 07-Moneydance/dp/B00005A9VI

One of the problems with using humans is that they are expensive--the other is that they become bored easily. It isn't like the defense establishment isn't using human translators, the NSA is the largest employer of translators in the world. They use humans in every listening post out there, but for the same reasons that humans make lousy airport security sceeners, they make poor translators AND intelligence analylists. This isn't saying that machine translators are a panacea, but they can solve a small section of the problem that we have been trying to solve with a very human capital intensive solution for years now.

After reading TFA, consulting with several DSLR-owning friends, I just ordered a 6.3MP Fuji FinePix F30. One of the main selling points: ISO 3200 "at full resolution", and a remarkably low noise even at high ISOs. I considered the Canon SD800 IS, which provides image stabilization, but can't the the low-light tricks that the Fuji F30 can.

Fuji F30 + 1GB xD card = a hair under $300, and there's a $50 rebate, which you can use to buy a lens hood in the springtime when the rebate check arrives.

Anyway, ISO 3200 for under $300 ($250 if you believe in the rebate fairy) seemed like an excellent deal on a pretty good light-catcher.

-Mark

From the What's That Clickin' Noise? show.

The book teaches the principles of Python programming by letting the reader create simple games. I found this method to be more concrete and rewarding than other books whose examples were very abstract. My one complaint is that the last three chapters on object oriented programing and gui graphic programing are a little confusing and use a watered down version of PyGames and LiveWires modules.

However, it provided me, a self-proclaimed programming idiot, a good solid foundation in the basics of programing.