Slashdot Mirror

Right here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000645DD/ 103-2487623-3561400

Of course, this only has 10 games on it.. but I'd expect in the future (when these games come out of copyright.. or whatever is holding them back) to see a 100 or more. I'd love to finish Pitfall2!

I would highly recommend Solaris to lovers of science fiction, who surely abound on a "News for Nerds" site like Slashdot. Don't expect hard SF with the focus on technology like Vernor Vinge, but rather a more psychological and mysterious style of storytelling somewhat like Gene Wolfe. The movie by

Does it include the core expansion pack?

>What confuses me are the most is that some of my favorite books are the most the expensive. Among them:
>
> * Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning
> * Duda, Hardt & Stork's Pattern Classification
> * Russell & Norvig's AI: A Modern Approach (the book that every AI teacher uses)
>
>
>Why? These books are standards and needed by everyone. They should be able to capitalize off the >popularity by lowering the price. Surely it doesn't take $120 to make Mitchell's Machine Learning--it's >such a tiny book!

Get Alpaydin's "Introduction to Machine Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)"
It is newer, better, and cheaper (less than half the price of Duda & Hart or Mitchell's)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262012111/ ($50)
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnin quiry.asp?ISBN=0262012111&pdf=y ($45-$50)

doubt it'll help, he didnt even install linux, all he had to do is read the frickin' message on the screen to understand what was going on. He didnt even understand it was a OS, he really needs something like PC's for dummies.

It's $5 cheaper too.

doubt it'll help, he didnt even install linux, all he had to do is read the frickin' message on the screen to understand what was going on. He didnt even understand it was a OS, he really needs something like PC's for dummies.

It's $5 cheaper too.

This is like an expansion of the musical traditions of musique concrete and rigorously mathematical composition which gave the 20th century some of its most noted works of art music. See Iannis Xenakis' Formalized Music and Griffith's Modern Music and After (Oxford University Press, 1996). Yet, it is being applied to news media and creates interesting tapestries that are a perfect match for the times we live in. New technologies really do create new kinds of art, although I suspect for now some would be reluctant to call this art.

This is like an expansion of the musical traditions of musique concrete and rigorously mathematical composition which gave the 20th century some of its most noted works of art music. See Iannis Xenakis' Formalized Music and Griffith's Modern Music and After (Oxford University Press, 1996). Yet, it is being applied to news media and creates interesting tapestries that are a perfect match for the times we live in. New technologies really do create new kinds of art, although I suspect for now some would be reluctant to call this art.

"Music of the primes" is a great book for the non- or semi-mathematician that deals extensively with the Riemann function. In this book the author touched on the weird significance of "42" to the function but I'm afraid I can't explain it but sort of understood while I read it. Great book though - check it out . . . http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0066210704/102-69 90660-1984935?v=glance&n=283155 The history of Maths is way more interesting that you think . . .

For this debut, the Canadian Opera Company is producing its first complete Ring Cycle

I no longer get excited when hearing about a new production of the Ring cycle, since I know that the event is usually sold out long before most people hear about it. It seems like the Ring is now being reserved toward the wealthy with connections who can purchase the high-priced tickets a couple of years in advance. I, and I suppose other Wagner fans of limited means, have only the Metropolitan Opera DVD recordings, which are quite good but not a substitute for the actual theatre experience

I actually got a different pen mouse for my brother for Christmas (he wanted a pen-based mouse). I should ask him how well it is working for him.

• Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning
• Duda, Hardt & Stork's Pattern Classification
• Russell & Norvig's AI: A Modern Approach (the book that every AI teacher uses)

• Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning
• Duda, Hardt & Stork's Pattern Classification
• Russell & Norvig's AI: A Modern Approach (the book that every AI teacher uses)

• Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning
• Duda, Hardt & Stork's Pattern Classification
• Russell & Norvig's AI: A Modern Approach (the book that every AI teacher uses)

So it's started. Go read Oryx and Crake. Bio-engineered piggins that grow food on their backs, and the eventual downfall of humanity caused by bio-engineering. I'm sure other people have written about it, but this wasn't a bad book.

True. The American army is a peak oil believer, and if they believe in even the most tame of drastic scenarios presented in e.g. Roberts' The End of Oil , one wonders why European militaries are still using so much fuel.

While many remixers objectively suck, the best are continuing in the perfectly legitimate tradition of musique concrete or electronic experimentation that has resulted in some of the 20th century's most original artistic creations. See Griffith's Modern Music and After 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1996). When I hear a remix like that the UK duo Spooky made of Lush's "Undertow", treating the original as raw sound material instead of any already existing song in need of some kind of improvement, I can't help but compare it to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge.

My vote would be for Robert Hamburger's noted ninja site. The Real Ultimate Power book brought this to the public's attention years after it ceased to be funny to Internet cognoscenti.

What isn't clear in the link the the article is that it's in the Washington Post's Sunday OPINION section. It is not a hard news article, has weak sourcing, and is written by people with an agenda (selling a book (still listed as written by anonymous despite the credit at the end of the web article) and promoting a cause (that asks for donations and needs your money to fight terrorism. (Much like every other article in the OPINION section.) The givaway is in the second paragraph: After pursuing an investigation into a European terrorism suspect, British investigators raided Tsouli's house, where they found stolen credit card information, according to an American source familiar with the probe. A "source familiar" could be anyone anywhere who claims to be familiar with the case. In the intelligence/SIGINT world, there is no verification. How the heck would an American source be truly familiar with the case? Clearly not a primary source -- just someone repeating something off the global intel net.

The story is an excellent piece of propaganda that offers "insight" into how you can promote yourself in the opinion section of a national newspaper. Instead of debating the worth of the story in and of itself, slashdotters have the same old debate over terrorism vs. privacy vs. freedom.

Please send me your money now and I'll fight terrorism by putting together a crappy web billboard ripped off from SETI, forming a 501c(3) organization, writing a book anonymously, and using your money to hire a PR firm to represent me and get my stories in the Post. Really, send me your money now and you'll be helping fund my net-centric asymmetric (insert jargon-of-the-week here) battle against terrorism. Free (anonymous) book with donations of $1000 or more.

Hey, if you don't believe I'm winning the war on terrorism, just read my story in the Post...

This and other business plans sources can be found in the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

There's a good (fiction) book called "Link" by Walt Becker that deals with the discovery of evidence of a new species. Summary from Amazon: Paleoanthropologist Samantha Colby and her team have discovered a skeleton of humanoid but not human origin in West Africa. In addition, they found an artifact composed of metal not found on Earth. Samantha asks her former lover, renegade scientist Jack Austin, to assist her in solving the mystery. Austin has long proposed the interaction of extraterrestrials with early man, but he has been the laughing stock of the scientific community. As they unravel the mystery, their journey takes them from Central Africa to the Andes and what they discover might kill the laughter in the throats of Jack's detractors. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0380731614/qid=11 43397139/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-1883774-52033 25?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Agreed, Kerberos can be an excellent solution. The author of this story should see O'Reilly's Kerberos: The Definitive Guide or a similar introduction.

You know, the similarities between the growth of technology and the "fictional" world in the book "The Traveler" are getting a little too eerie for me.

I wonder how long until people start using diluted steroids and such to temporarily alter their face's shape (as mentioned in the book, of course) to get around the rapidly advancing face recognition technology, for good or evil motives?

If you are looking for a job, try what color is your parachute. It is only $11.67 on Amazon. And here is even a link. If you are too poor to buy it, you can get it at a local library. It will teach you the ways to find a job. But if you are really really lazy, one thing that might work better than Moster is google. Try "entry level programmer" (or whatever you are doing) and you will probably get much better results. And try to only apply for jobs you are interested in and somewhat qualified for, don't become a resume spammer.

Hell, YES! Actually, though, I prefer the term "Anarcho-capitalist"

The reasoning for my beliefs is simply and beautifully presented in this Flash animation:
http://isil.org/resources/introduction.swf

A bunch of anarchists, minarchists, Libertarians, and small-government Republicans hang out on the FTL BBS. Come on by and browse a bit :D

The Cities in Flight were a wonderful series of novels by James Blish. I miss them.

• Provide direct access to stakeholders with requirements, including customers if possible, domain experts, etc.
• Fire poor performers quickly. Sooner if possible. Let the team decide who these people are (you'll hear the complaints quickly if you are receptive).
• Get the team to agree on formatting and design conventions. This will save you more time and frustration than you know. People who insist on their own conventions are unprofessional and should have failed the criteria for being hired (they're not good team members).
• Identify the team tie-breaker. You may use the title "team lead", "project manager", "architect", whatever. This is the person who makes the call when consensus doesn't happen quickly.
• Get an effective issue tracking system. Bugzilla is a free and minimal option. Scarab may be ready for prime time (but wasn't a year ago when I last checked). Trac is simple but clean (and once they add the issue process enhancements... woo hoo). Rally is commercial and hosted, but very effective for agile teams.
• Install subversion (use the file-based installation, the db installation option is still flaky). Understand and utilize subversion's features (branches and variations on branches are #1 on this list).
• Protect the tip with a minimum of a nightly build. There are build checkers (calavista is good, there are some open source alternatives that can frequently check the status of the tip... I wish I could remember some names).

No, you're right -- the framers were vague (and conflicting) in their desire for the commerce clause. It's a debate I lose based on the facts. I still don't think the Constitution allows these barriers to be created, though.

At the time of the framing of the Constitution, commerce meant ""[i]ntercourse, exchange of one thing for another, interchange of anything; trade; traffick." This is per Sam Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition 1765. I believed based on this definition alone I lose the debate with international trade (but win the debate with interstate trade).

The problem is that one should dig deeper. The Constitution was accepted because James Madison promised that "The commerce clause would forever be used to protect the liberty of every American to trade in an unhindered way." This lets me believe that the intent was not for the federal government to restrict trade but to try to help enable trade.

It is a deeper problem than a few words or paragraphs can deal with, but I'm still reading and researching more on the intent of the ideas of the Framers. I believe we've twisted so many words in the past 200 years that it is very hard to see any reason to even refer to the Constitution as it stands today.

This article has to have misstated the issue. Not even MS is arrogant enough to believe they can pull this off.

The theory that applies to this nicely: The Red Queen

And the entire book on it: The Red Queen : Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

[hey! wrote:]A Victorian pervert probably got all kinds of sticky enjoyment out of pictures of ladies in their underwear, even if the ladies were rather, uh, plain and middle aged, and the undewear looks like a cotton interpretation of a teutonic knight's jousting armor.

Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 costs about $125, and can be run on three different computers.

Microsoft stresses that this version of their Office 2003 is only for non-commercial use. You qualify for this edition so long as you are 1) a full- or part-time student enrolled in a K-12 institution, 2) home-schooled, 3) taking at least 6 credits at an accredited college/university, or 4) a full- or part-time faculty member and work 20+ hours at a school.

When I bought my copy, I had a child in Kindergarten. A year later, and he still hasn't used Office -- but my wife and I did.

Sorry for that advertisement for M$ products.

Oh yeah, I frequently use Open Office -- which is free, does a great job most of the time, and runs on almost everything.

Best. Book. Ever.

A bit long, but one of the funniest pieces of fiction I've ever read. I've been thinking of investing in some pigs for the yard, actually.


If you liked Unintended Consequences by John Ross, check out Matt Bracken's Enemies Foreign and Domestic. You can read the first 18 chapters or so for free at http://enemiesforeignanddomestic.com/excerpts.htm

While UC was an interesting historical novel, the main character was too perfect. Like John Ryan from the Tom Clancy novels, Henry Bowman was obviously the author's alter-ego who walked across water to save us all.

And I see that you've been modded from +5 Insightful to +2 Overrated Flamebait. What do you expect on Slashdot? You should have said that you blamed Fox News for the Patriot Act and how much you love the ACLU, or something like that...

Relativity is not intuitive. Your questions demonstrate that much for sure.

The space traveler's DO NOT notice any change in the pace of time. Nobody will ever notice any change in the pace of their own clocks, chemical processes or entropy rates. The traveler will look back at earth and see that all its distances are foreshortened in the direction of travel. The earthlings will look at the space ship and think its clock is running too slow. The paradox is resolved by noting that one underwent acceleration and the other did not.

The question "two photons, L and R, head out from a lightbulb going in opposite directions, what is their relative speed?" is the classic question for separating the clued from the clueless. When you ask the question, you are acutally implying the fixed cartesian grid throughout space that you just said you knew to be a mistake. You're imaginging yourself in some priveleged observational frame seeing two photons but what question are you really asking? You are asking "what relative speed does photon L measure in trying to measure the speed of photon R?" The answer is always and only C no matter who takes the measurement. It was that observation, difficult though it was for others to accept it, that got Einstein thinking in the first place, it was like the proverbial apple that hit Newton on the head.
Try to think "space is squishy because of the time dimension"...not easy but it helps some people to visualize the physical world as relativistic observations reveal it to be.
Martin Gardener probably wrote some of the most accessible books on relativity for non physicists though he seems to leave some readers confused about GR...but then most people always will be. But if you are a really fast learner, you could try these lectures Space and Time in Special Relativity looks good but I have not read it...there are dozens of these. I got started with an introductory book by Bertrand Russell that is long out of print. Gamow was also a good popularizer.

The Language Instinct is a summary for laymen of research done by linguists over the last 50 years that overwhelmingly supports certain ideas about language acquisition and language change. So, even if there is another popular science book that refutes it (in this case Sampson's Educating Eve , a shoddy work written by a crackpot and supporting a minority view), there are thousands of papers and monographs supporting the ideas in Pinker's book.

Your son's learning to talk has nothing to do with your teaching him and is simply due to his natural ability to acquire language from the sounds around him as time goes by. And anecdotal evidence doesn't really count for anything, anyway.

Just peeked over at amazon, and found this link to the game, by Vivendi.

No mention about the other games on that listing though... the only thing I could find about them on google was this old 1Up blog review

plead the second. (Score:5, Insightful)
by dada21 (163177) on Thursday March 23, @10:37AM (#14980524)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/ | Last Journal: Monday January 09, @10:55PM)

I have a solution to fixing the FCC and it has to do with my subject line. Figure it out.

I believe the FCC is one of the most unconstitutional departments in the Federal government and completely destroys the reason why it was set up in the first place.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1888118040/002-40 66203-5783260

You don't need to teach babies language, they will learn in on their own. That is one of the main points of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct . Children worldwide start talking at the same time whether adults try to teach them or not. Pinker does a little mocking of American mothers saying sacchrine things like "What is that? It's a doggie? A dog-gie!" as if their children needed their conscious help to learn, when in many cultures children's linguistic talents are just ignored by the adult community until they have gained speech naturally. They all still end up speaking at the same time.

While I appreciate Kurzweil's insights in The Age of Spiritual Machines , I sometimes wonder if the technological progress he foresees will be slowed down by companies trying to give consumers the least amount of computing power which they can and still be competitive and at the same time charging as much as possible. Add to that the very real possibility of a Luddite reaction against new technology, and Kurzweil's timeline doesn't seem so sure anymore.

Last Christmas I got this The Ultimate History of Video Games book. And I can really recommend it. It describes how everything got started, from pinball machines to arcade machines to the first home entertainment systems. Also very nice to read how all of the Atari developers where smoking drugs all day long, and how their annoyed managers hated that :)

You may hate the movies but they make a great foil for philosophers to practice their craft much as superheroes were for physicists.

You may hate the movies but they make a great foil for philosophers to practice their craft much as superheroes were for physicists.

Over 40? Good programmer? Apply at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/jobs

We're looking for experienced programmers. If I see a resume that says "twenty years experience", I schedule them for a talk by phone. Right now, I'd hire someone who was 74 if they could promise me a year of strong coding.

There may be ageist individuals in IT hiring. However, I reject the notion that that's all that there is. I'd rather be 40 with experience than 22 with no experience. Far better chance of getting a job with experience.

Amazon's hiring (I know because I work there). Sure, we get ten resumes for every position. However, we're still short of qualified people. I read those resumes. I reject them. I do so not as management but as a prospective team member. I have a simple criterion. Does the decrease in pages from an extra body in the on call rotation outweigh the extra pages that I'll get because they messed up? I want an H-1B visa increase because I want more qualified candidates.

If you really are any good, apply at http://www.amazon.com/jobs -- we could use the help.

Google's hiring (I know because they keep stealing my coworkers).

Yahoo and Microsoft are hiring (Ok, I'm not quite as sure of those two).

Maybe none of those companies matches your experience. Keep looking. Post your resume (most of the resumes that I see are from Monster). Plan time each day to check out a few companies and apply direct (online is fine but postal mail is better); five a day is a decent pace. Polish your resume. Up your keyword count. If you primarily used Perl at your last job, make sure that Perl appears on your resume. Bourne shell scripting? Bash? Oracle? C++? Cobol? Sparc hardware? Cat5? Whatever it might be, make sure that it's in your resume so that keyword searches find it.

Make sure that you have a good cover letter when applying to companies that are not using job sites. Most of them will ignore it in favor of the resume, but occasionally people do read the cover letters. Grammatically challenged? Pay someone to write up a resume and cover letter for you. Always spell check and show to friends for proofreading.

Glowing reviews from all your managers? Add them to your packet, along with contact info. HR is restricted in terms of what they ask, but they can certainly verify legitimacy of a review.

Code samples? Open source projects? Add them to your packet.

On average, it takes something like six months and a hundred resumes to find a job.

The article is really only about the pervasive threat of radiation that humans face if they leave the Earth and its protections behind. They genuflect about time dilation which is a consequence of relativistic physics but don't even try to explain. What we have known theoretically and have verified experimentally for about a century is that space and time are mixed together in a very algebraically specific way when viewed by different observers who are in relative motion. One consequence of this theory is called time dilation which means that each observer in relative motion sees the others' time as being dilated (slowed down) relative to what he experiences in his own frame of reference. I know this sounds paradoxical but it is nicely explained in Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler and many other sources (maybe check Wikipedia).

What is quite incredible is that if we could build a ship capable of constant 1 g acceleration we could travel just about anywhere in the universe in what appears to be about 40 years to people on the ship (see chapter 6 of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler for the mathematical details). Of course it is worth noting that all our space exploration has been conducted with ballistic missles which are nothing like a spacecraft capable of constant 1 g acceleration. There is significant reason to doubt that it is possible to build such a device. But it is true that humans are quite comfortable with 1 g acceleration (that is equivalent to the force of gravity at the Earth's surface). I think that it is beyond merely remarkable that relativistic physics guarantees that if our range would be so great if only such a spacecraft could be built.

What this article and a much more complete similar article in Scientific American (March 2006 page 40)explain is that radiation puts a severe damper on the ecomonics of space travel. Pioneers of space flight have been flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to radiation shielding. Frankly I suspect it is a second order problem in the cosmic quest. If we could devise a starship capable of constant acceleration then just encase the whole thing in as sufficient water or something similar to duplicate Earth's protective atmosphere. Assemble it in space far up in Earth's gravity well with material mined from asteroids. Of course there is still the issue of inventing those darn dilithium crystals.

Imagine traveling to another galaxy and returning in less than one hundred years as experienced in your reference frame while the Earth has aged about 4 billion years. Who says we can't have time machines? The only problem is that they are all one way, into the far future. Check these musings in Kip Thorne's book Black Holes and Time Warps

Until Paypal address the issues presented by PaypalSucks and similar sites, I'm going to continue to feel disillusioned about what was once the cat's pajamas.

But anyway, looks like O'Reilly will need to update Paypal Hacks with information on this new mobile device support. The 2004 edition is getting noticeably out-of-date.

Last I heard you couldn't buy OS X. You have to buy a new computer and it comes with it.

So when major OS upgrades come out, how do you think us Mac users get them? A stork drops it off in the garden?

I've got some news for you...

So where do books that are neither technical nor fiction, such as Defensa Apasionada del Idioma Espanol , go?

If the only thing I had at the end of a 50-minute class was a memory of what was said, I am certain that I --personally -- will remember less than if I had the opportunity to write notes during the class.

Specifically, writing what I think is important helps me remember the key points visually, plus I believe there is a benefit in the note-taking itself -- a kinetic engagement of the new material, if you will -- especially if it's not strictly words but includes a few diagrams/pictures.

The book Multimedia Learning by Richard E. Mayer (links to Amazon.com) includes scientific evidence proving that most people learning more if they engage multiple senses (e.g. hearing and sight) while learning. (Interestingly, he also shows that we tend to learn less if the visual part of the learning is simply to read word-for-word what the lecturer is saying. E.g. any speaker who reads his PowerPoint slides to you word for word is actually diminishing what you might have gained from the presentation.)