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Good to know! Now maybe they can get to work on those other trifling brain disorders like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow disease--you know the minor ones that don't mean anything.

Actually, deja vu--along with similar phenomena like presque vu and jamais vu--is a major part of senility. Studying it could lead to a better understanding of getting soft in the head in general.

If you like science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, specifically the volume Blue Mars has these symptoms of senility as a major plot point. It's a sort of fate that might await us all as lifespans grow increasingly longer.

Earlier in the year, on the suggestion of Mike Wilson, Romero had agreed to an ad that would emulate the cheeky bravado of deathmatch smack-talk -- the very language Romero had helped define. But when he saw the words in print, he felt a tinge of hesitation. "Are you sure about this?" he asked Mike.
"Yeah," Mike said, "don't be a pussy."
Romero agreed. The ad ran in all the major gaming publications in April with simply these words written in black against a red background: "John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch." Underneath was the tag line "Suck It Down!" -- a phrase Mike had recently trademarked.

I liked the story of FFVIII more than the gameplay. But perhaps that is just me...

Regardless of how much the gameplay in Final Fantasy VIII sucked, its CGI was just beautiful. Really, the story itself didn't matter, the CGI could have been about anything at all, but it was so beautifully done for its time. I'm not FFVIII is an example of why story matters, I think it serves to show how sufficiently-polished and cinematic graphics can enthrall any gamer.

Gameplay complaints, namely that the guardian force system kept the user watching the same long scenes over and over again, are oddly restricted to the West. In Japan, the game was a hit and received excellent reviews.

At least XML works. Instead of technologies, I'd be much more critical of development techniques that are pitched as silver bullets, like Extreme Programming. Remember that? All the rage a few years ago, with even level-headed publishers like O'Reilly getting in on the action --they even released a pocket guide, come on, what is this, devotion on the level of Mao's little red book? -- it was supposed to solve bottlenecks in development and result in cleaner, more easily maintainable code. Instead, all it did was make people blow a lot of money on books, and slow down output because in the XP you're supposed to code with your annoying coworker right there next to you with all his backseat driving.

If one codes in a way he's personally comfortable with, he can get the job done even if it involves a not globally ideal technology like XML, but when working methods are pushed down by above with no consideration for individual needs, that's dangerous.

I admit there is an outside chance they will stumble on the correct result but can they prove it's correct?

There's the possibility of scientists eventually creating black holes to experiment on. That's a favorite of science-fiction disaster stories like David Brin's Earth , or Roger MacBride Allen's The Ring of Charon. Then you'd have the proof right in front of you.

My point, which you obtusely missed, was that the parent post said that scientists such as he would not allow their preconceived notions to allow them to miss the truth when proven scientifically. In the same post he stated that a scientific proving of the existance of God would not change his POV. Therefore, he contradicted himself---I was merely underscoring that. Of course, when one sets the criteria of proof, anything can be avoided.

And my point was that none of these questions cannot *ever* be settled one way or the other by science - in a sense that religion and science talk past each other, the only real confusion is that which takes place when people try to replace science with a literal reading of scripture. There is no real conflict there, a belief in God is not mutually exclusive with a respect or love for science. In other words, I was trying to reframe the parent's argument to make a stronger point.

What Science can't do is prove God exists? I disagree. It is a logical fallacy to force the other side to prove a negative, but Science can't prove God does not exist any more than it can

Good, we agree then. I said the following in my post:

Scientists cannot prove that God, a supernatural entity, exists or doesn't exist, or any of those other questions

*Everything* you know is of course an inference made on the premise that you trust that your sensory perception is not in error, which is a "leap"(most would say justified) of faith . So yes, everything that counts as knowledge is actually simply a justified belief. But the criterion for justification in science is different from that in religion. Not only that, but religion changes the definition of "know" from "justified belief" to "justified, infallible, true belief." So religion claims knowledge where science claims belief. This definition of knowledge is *built* into science - otherwise science wouldn't produce anything of value, because it has to be flexible to replace bad or insufficient theories with better ones.

There is direct evidence supporting evolution. Micro-evolution happens all the time - microbes become resistant to antibiotics, viruses (while only half-alive) mutate in ways to improve their chances for survival. There have been macro-evolutionary changes in species dating from the industrial revolution. See the book The Beak of the Finch. IIRC there have been reports of new divergences occuring in species in Canada as well.

Look, I'm not an atheist - I should have made this clearer. At the very least I'm an agnostic, if not a deist or theist. What I'm arguing against is not an inference establishing the existence of God but everything thing that comes *after* that inference is made. That is, all of the assumptions about moral values and the veracity of religious myth set down thousands of years ago with in many cases no more evidence than the advice of the cleric or parent who passed down scripture. This is what largely constitutes religious organization and defines religious conflict. This is where the confusion, ignorance, and violence come in. We can't make assumptions about God's moral values because we have no logical justification for those assumptions. While God's existence can be inferred, what can't be inferred is what God wants us to do with our lives. Every version of that story has been invented out of whole cloth. Atheists seem to mistakenly channel their resentment towards such religious posturing into a wholesale denial of a creator. I don't think this is logical any more than you do.

And while the mere existence of God isn't scientifically relevant, it is philosophically relevant and also a logical inference assuming our premise holds true that every effect has a cause. Everything in the realm of transcendental and analytic notions belongs to philosophy

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060724-73 40.html
For a company like Xerox or AT&T, what it meant to have a blue sky research lab was very much like what it means for a city to host a winning sports team; it was a source of pride and an anchor of collective identity. So much like the science that they produced, these labs were ends in themselves.

FWIW, famed Apple engineer Dominic Giampaolo (Spotlight, HFS+, BeOS, Be File System, etc.) has some pretty strong praise for this book:

Giampaolo's review on Amazon

If you're reading his review on Amazon, might as well check out other reviews of the book as well. Some of them are from famous techies (David Butenhof, author of POSIX Threads Programming, and Marc Rochkind, author of Advanced UNIX Programming).

To all you Slashdot geniuses who are so summarily judging this book (I have it, and I've read it).

(a.) Have you read the reviews of this book on Amazon or elsewhere? Here you go.
(b.) Better still, have you checked it out, even if briefly, before commenting on how you think it is?

Haha I think not. Goddammit I keep forgetting how things are supposed to work on Slashdot (punches self). Still I suggest do (b.) above... you'll be in for a surprise.

Nice that you got a free copy, because according to Amazon it sells for more than than a lot of people would be willing to pay (and that's after the significant discounts of their 3rd party sellers). Remember when you could get fine technical materials no more than $30?

The BBC ends up hiring a rival researcher to use the superior lab equipment to try to confirm bubble fusion. No dice. Of course, the original researcher then claims that he they weren't doing the experiment correctly, but refuses to help them redo the experiment with his special modifications.

This is typical of these cases. There is a good book on hafnium isomer explosives, "Imaginary Weapons", that goes into detail on the same pathology in another field.

British Airways, for example, is a pain to deal with because they have different cultural protocol for complaints

You misspelled "total bastards".

The best resource (though getting dated) on the origins and meaning of shared nothing v. shared-something archticture is Greg Pfister's In Search of Clusters, 2nd ed..

There's "degenerate" shared nothing, which is what I find most people referring to today -- you have web server farm and you don't store session state, or if you do, you "pin" it to a particular server. Or you just rely on the database. It's degenerate because, sure, it's scalable (memory isn't as directly linked to concurrent users), but it really just shifts the burden to the database, which tends to be 1 big box.

So the question becomes, how do you scale the database horizontally?

In the database world, the term has become somewhat overloaded. Originally it meant physically shared disks and/memory vs. using network interconnectivity. But with the rise of I/O shipping technologies over networks (iSCSI, high speed NFS/NAS, SAN fibre-channel), this isn't really true anymore. So now, it comes down to how your data is partitioned and how you ship a read/write function to that node. Does a node "own" it's data (or a replica)? Or can any node touch any data? That's the debate.

In short, it works well in some cases: read-mostly parallel queries and/or search, which is why Google's using it, or why you see it with data warehouses (Teradata, DB2 UDB). It works OK if you have mostly have transactional data updates within a well-defined partitionable set of data (such as the TPC-C benchmark). It works less well when dealing with transactional updates spread across the entire data set (assuming a normal distribution), as you'll need to update replicas with a two-phase commit. The load balancing of your data across nodes also requires care in picking the appropriate partitioning key: sometimes a hash works well, sometimes range-values work well. If you need to re-partition your data for whatever reason, it's going to be a big job.

Commercially, Oracle 10g's Real Application Clusters is an example of a shared disk database, though they use an interconnect between nodes for cache coherency. Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Teradata, MySQL, etc. are all "shared nothing".

Foley and Van Dam have lots of info: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201609215/sr=8-1 /qid=1153828209/ref=sr_1_1/103-0593733-9387027?ie= UTF8/

The butler did it!

KFG

We're on the defensive because we're not organizing in an attempt to attack anyone.

You need to work on your logic - here's a book to help:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/087975124X/002-47 44603-5464036?v=glance&n=283155

Please try to keep in mind, getting together in groups of people who think like you do to rally against every make and model of dissenting opinion does not make you more correct - it simply makes you more obnoxious. What's more, you get less and less feedback of your mistakes. Such as attacking other sovereign countries because God tells you it's the right thing to do.

You have misinterpreted my point. The point is that if "they" are forced to kill you if they want to take you, they guys on the ground may decide that killing you is not acceptable and refuse to follow orders.

That's what I thought you meant. The sticking point for me is 'may decide'.

You make a fine argument, I just disagree. Can I recommend a book to you?

Save yourself $16.65 by buying the book here: Learning SQL on SQL Server 2005. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $17.09, or 38.58%!

Save yourself $16.65 by buying the book here: Learning SQL on SQL Server 2005. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $17.09, or 38.58%!

You can find an absolutely fascinating study of how the symbols of our creation myths (primarily Genesis, but others are explored fairly well) seem to reflect our actual evolutionary history in Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.

While it includes some later-disproven assertions (dinosaurs being killed off by a nearby supernova, mainly), most of it is brilliant and engrossing for anyone interested in topics like this.

He postulates that Genesis is really the story of the evolution of human intelligence being selected for because it was necessary for us to defeat the reptiles which preyed on our ancestors. We defeated the serpents -- there are no more legged "dragon" type creatures which every human civilization remembers in legend. However, the price we paid was a separation from the animal kingdom, self-consciousness (the realization that we are naked), and most interesting to me, pain in childbirth because of our big brain-holding heads.

Another interesting bit from the book: In every single culture in the world, the sounds "ssssssss" or "sssshhhhhhhhhh" mean "Everybody Shut Up!", as in, "Quiet! Snake!".

It's a good, quick read. I enjoyed it on a Lufthansa flight from Philly to Frankfurt a few years ago. Highly recommended.

Actually there are .net framework diagrams, and they're cheaper than $20

.NET Class Libraries Reference Poster : $5

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Poster Pack : $19.99 before discounts, but I've seen it given away when you buy 2 MS Press books.

Of course MS also supply class posters in the Visual Studio box, but in case you're using the Express editions you can download and print your own copy from Bard Abrams' blog.

Actually there are .net framework diagrams, and they're cheaper than $20

.NET Class Libraries Reference Poster : $5

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Poster Pack : $19.99 before discounts, but I've seen it given away when you buy 2 MS Press books.

Of course MS also supply class posters in the Visual Studio box, but in case you're using the Express editions you can download and print your own copy from Bard Abrams' blog.

Ok, granted he directly answer the question. So sue.

But the advice he's giving is usually good advice. jmac880n gave an excellent answer, but it may be completely overkill for the askers needs. The base problem is that the math for doing plots of n-ything, can be truly daunting and thoroughly frustrate the beginner.

However, given that the oversimplified answer has now been stated. I learned this skill while exploring fractals. They are mathematically simple and the authors of books on the subject often include all the source code for doing great looking plots for the various forms of them.

The books I learned on are out of print, but this one looked good, and if I were pursuing this again, I'd browse through a couple similar titles at my local expensive book store and find an author who explains the source code in a way I connect with and pay his/her exhorbitant fee for the book.

"Spin State" by Chris Moriarty. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553382136

First hard sci fi book I have read in a while, but I enjoyed it. Posthumans and emergent AIs--the theme of TFA--feature heavily, but don't get in the way. First 30 pages are a little slow, but after that it rocks.

This summer I read C.S. Lewis's masterpiece The Abolition of Man. (No, I didn't link-jack the Amazon link for want of filthy lucre.)

Skip reading the editorial review. Here are some excerpts from the first customer reviewer, Charles Warman:

Lewis accurately predicts the parallel development of two trends: (1) ... (2) the ability of a scientific or political elite, through social conditioning and/or genetic manipulation, to affect the thinking of successive generations of the rest of us - the great unwashed.

So where will it end? In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man's ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature's ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.

Well known author of what? Never heard of it. For that matter, never heard of him. Probably 'cause I don't care.

Smart Mobs was one of the most popular books for nerds a few years back, and was even mentioned in the popular press (with some television hype). I remember reading the book and thinking that the Japanese already had all this cool technology and the U.S. and Europe were still in some kind of dark ages. I'd venture that the metropolitan U.S. and Japan are about even now, though.

Whether you care or not, you undoubtedly heard of him, but perhaps you simply forgot. It has been a while, after all.

Only because they aren't allowed to own bombs. You trust an organization who's only purpose is to create more wealth and power for tiself, with no public oversight? You're a fool.

You are every bit as much a fool if you believe that the only purpose of a corporation is to "create more wealth and power for tiself[sic]". According to This book companies that exist solely to make money for their owners tend to not do very well when compared to companies that exist to tackle jobs that are too large for individuals to tackle alone.

For that matter, if corporations gather all this wealth and power for itself, what's to stop large corporations from acquiring bombs? You say it's "not allowed" but why would a powerful entity accept an arbitrary limitation like that? I think it's more likely that corporations don't use bombs because using bombs is bad for business.

I read that as Project Onion.

And I understood it as an awesome story of taking the brave inhabitants of a post-nuclear war Earth to the furthest reaches of the stars. The current military decisions of the U.S., Iran, and North Korea were starting to become quite clear. Too bad it turns out it's something different.

There was a German transcription for DTP - "Dumme Treiben Plötsinn" (along the lines of "Dumbheads Try Printing"). So it is more likely that language and readability of printed matter will decline/degrade even more. But that does not matter, cause technical quality (10^y dpi, full colour) will be state-of-the-art.

The readibility will decline even if the prose is decent. I doubt these firms are providing users with the ability to designate the language of certain blocks of texts, which is necessary for proper hyphenation and ligatures. Everything will just end up being hyphenated like in English, which will really break the occasional foreign word you have in your document. And what if you are using a lot of non-ISO-8859 characters? If your book explores some of the upper ranges of Unicode, the company's fonts may not suffice.

On the other hand, maybe there's a firm out there that will accept PDFs, so one is able to typeset one's work in LaTeX, or other professional typesetting software, instead of relying on the company's solution.

I wish LaTeX were thought of more around here. Even if LaTeX isn't a solution for 99% of pedestrian users, there's no reason why Slashdotters with their technical skills couldn't use it for all their needs. Just consult the TeX FAQ and get a small tutorial like Kopka & Daly's Guide to LaTeX . It would be nice to break the tradition of using Word (or, for Free Software afficionados) OpenOffice.org for important stuff.

I have looked into lulu, my issue was the rules lulu had on the content.

I have 2 books that I have written. One is along the lines of "Steel this book" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/156858217X/sr=8-1 /qid=1153516930/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-7799701-8095015?i e=UTF8 The other is, well, more controversial. Both could be considered objectionable, and could facilitate the breaking of the law. Both are violations of there member agreement. As such I can not use them or any other print on demand service to self publish.

As technology advances, the technology to fool it advances too. There's a nice balance in that, don't you think?

That number is just an educated guess at best. Taking that number seriously, as it was in the late 90's, is fool hardy. It's best to completely ignore that number. See this: A Random Walk Down Wall Street in case you haven't. Enjoy!

You can read the first chapter for free from Max Barry's website, which is exactly where you'll see this.

Try only $100 after rebates and only a 1 year contract.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FYU4SO/qid=11 53458897/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-5994070-7801466?_ encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=301185

You know what's even more amazing is how the Vikings managed to cross the vast distance on a wind-powered raft.

I know that this is a joke, but the fact is that the sailing achievements of the historical Vikings across the Atlantic were not especially unusual. They simply knew how to make short hops from island to island. If the colonization of Easter Island had happened from the South American mainland, as Thor Heyerdahl set out to demonstrate in that old classic Kon-Tiki , then that would have been something awesome: 4300 miles straight.

Even beyond the matter of Easter Island, the Polynesian sailors of the South Pacific, though they used many of the same techniques, could kick the Vikings' asses in endurance and navigator skills.

A reunion is not out of the question, but it would take a lot to bring it together. Many of the old props were sold off when Best Brains closed down its production facility and went to a licensing/merchandise business model.

I'd really like to see more of the side projects, namely another book from Kevin Murphy. A Year at the Movies blew me away.

"Anyone have a "public" version of this doc?"

Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base

It occurs to me that all this attention to security detail will come to naught in the Star Trek future - they could just use the transporter and beam into any secure area, all they need are the coordinates and blammo, they're in.

I refer you over to Larry Niven's essay, "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation", collected in All The Myriad Ways; you'll probably need to check used bookstores or libraries for it. However, as my memory serves, he characterized that type of teleportation (both recieve-to-device-from-anywhere and send-from-device-to-anywhere) as "you don't get a society, you get a short war".

More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott and

The Bias Against Guns also by John Lott.

More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott and

The Bias Against Guns also by John Lott.

First:
        System.out
        System.err
They work just fine, and exactly like you'd expect. Now whether the developers used System.err is a different story. Personally, these two items should never be used in production code. (There are exceptions, but start with saying never, and then they'll hopefully only be used when they should be used)

As for logging in general, does anyone use anything but Log4J? Yes, I know a lot use commons-logging, why still boggles my mind. When's the last time you moved a logging system from log4j to anything else? You may have moved from something else (Sun's implementation, cough cough) to log4j however. And log4j can easily be configured to radically pinpoint whatever logging you actually want, provided it was properly implemented in the code, and not hacked by some "I read Learn Java in 24 Hours" architect who wrapped it because it seemed easier to code logs to a single static "Logger" class.

Sounds like you are on a good path, I wish you the best.

A couple quick pieces of advice for you:

- Read up on the Glycemic Index. It will give you a much more comprehensive understanding of your diet and how different foods will affect you. Note, it is not just sugar, it is most carbs. On that note, once you figure it out, you can open up your diet while still maintaining your glucose levels.

- Exercise is almost as important as your diet. In many ways, more important. 30-60 minutes of fast walking or medium biking 5-7 days a week will do miraculous things to your glucose levels, overall health, and maybe even save a little gas.

- If you cheat, get some exercise immediately afterwards. Even just walking home from the restaurant is a great practice that will help keep your glucose levels from spiking.

- Avoid going too low on your carbs, especially before being active or drinking alcohol. Hypoglycemia (too low) is very common with low carb diets (especially in diabetics for some reason). It is scary, and can kill you (either directly, or by passing out while driving, etc.). Always have some carbs in your breakfast and lunch (and dinner if you are drinking).

"Its probably also why nobody has made a machine based off the dodo."

I read "dildo" instead of dodo, and I'm thinking, "Man, there are all sorts of machines based on those!"

No joke

Prices start at $9

Firewall with Harrison Ford, which has never really peaked my interest to see yet, is listed at $19.99. I guess the 'future' of DVD buying hasn't arrived, as CinemaNow.com states on their homepage. You can get this film from Amazon for

For a second there... I thought they might actually be competitive.

I'm with the GP poster. There are a lot of sites which do Cthulu only knows what to good markup, all in the name of making it look just-so in IE.

Take a look at an old book on web design, Creating Killer Web Sites. This book was in its second edition almost ten years ago, which should give you some notion of how dated the advice now seems.

Siegal (the author) goes on a lengthy rant in the book about how web design "used to be" (read: in 1993) the exclusive domain of geeks and nerds, until brave graphic designers seized it and bravely said, "Hey! We're going to use tables and bad markup and whatever bizarre quirk of page rendering we can find in order to make our pages look the way we want them to!" It's an impassioned cry praising standards non-compliance. Every guy who has ever had to pore over some hacked-together layout that rendered correctly two browser versions ago, but seems impossible to do now, has some disciple of Siegal to thank for it.

Save yourself $15.30 by buying the book here: Pro PHP Security. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $15.77, or 35.58%!

Save yourself $15.30 by buying the book here: Pro PHP Security. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $15.77, or 35.58%!

It seems just plain rude for Slashdot to keep linking to B & N when Amazon has it cheaper. Look at their third-party sellers, there's not a site on the web that will get you a new, mint copy of the book for less. I understand that Slashdot gets kickbacks from B & N, but they shouldn't rip their readership off.

Not every movie I watch has to be Casablanca. I appreciate watching bad movies as an indulgence. I own (via gift) the Horrible Horrors Collection, volumes 1 and 2. Lately I've been watching The Greatest American Hero on DVD, of which no one would claim that the production values are top-notch.

I don't sit down with a bag of popcorn, dim the lights, and take these in with the full "movie experience". As you state - they aren't good enough to be worth the effort. However, they have a "quality" to them that can be appreciated while I also read slashdot, or add ID3 tags to my ripped music, or read the local paper. I can't define this "quality"; I certainly don't watch them just for laughs, even though many are (unintentionally) humorous. Maybe I'm more willing to use my imagination to improve and escape into worlds that are poorly presented on screen, compared to the average viewer today that demands a level of "realism" even in special effects.

One of the themes of The Gods Must Be Crazy is that the Bushmen in many ways were wiser than the European colonizers who thought themselves a "superior race." Besides the fact that the PS3 is not affordable in the third world, what would a people who have a much higher degree of family bonding and social contact think about us buying a machine just so we can sit alone all day?