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The best way to ensure accessibility is to simply use XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS. Too often these are seen as overly-complicated technologies, but how hard is it to close a tag once you open it, and why doesn't the ability to describe visual styling in one central location instead of thousands of files seem like a hassle instead of a blessing? Get O'Reilly's HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide and just see how much sense the elegant order and semantic meaningfulness of XHTML makes over prior markup solutions. Once you have a site up in XHTML 1.0 Strict, just make sure it validates with the W3C validator, and chances are, it'll already comply with Section 508.

Order from Chaos : A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life

Seriously, if you have kids, do them a favor and get rid of a lot of them. My father died and left truckloads of books, it is a curse.

Actually, according to The Black Book of Communism (which has a decent reputation, as I understand), the figure is around 85 to 100 million, all told.

The "fair tax" as described in the book does not allow you to deduct things because they were for "business use." The rule is, if you consume it, you have to pay tax on it. The only time you don't have to pay tax is when you're buying for resale.

I suppose the only loophole here is if you buy a bunch of inventory for resale and then sell it at a loss (thus causing the retail price to be less, and the tax to be less). But it would be really suspicious if the company you own bought only one Bugatti Veylon for "resale" and then was unable to sell it at full price and so sold it at a stupendous loss to, ah, you...

A lot of role-playing games have long foresaken the idea of allowing characters to choose the course of events. Instead, many plot elements are made obligatory so that the gamer can see the fancy CGI that the team put so many hours into creating. An early example of this trend is Final Fantasy VII, but the more recent example that really takes the cake is Final Fantasy X where pretty much all the free-roaming and ability to identify with the main character--the traditional strengths of the genre--where tossed out with unpleasant results.

A lot of role-playing games have long foresaken the idea of allowing characters to choose the course of events. Instead, many plot elements are made obligatory so that the gamer can see the fancy CGI that the team put so many hours into creating. An early example of this trend is Final Fantasy VII, but the more recent example that really takes the cake is Final Fantasy X where pretty much all the free-roaming and ability to identify with the main character--the traditional strengths of the genre--where tossed out with unpleasant results.

Obligatory Wikipedia link. CentOS is a project which uses the source packages published by Red Hat in order to create an Enterprise Linux solution that can compete with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is distributed only in uncool binary form. While the differences between RHEL and Fedora Linux, the everyday consumer version, are not great--they are often documented in a single book, as in Wiley's Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 Bible , CentOS is probably not important news for most Linux hobbyists.

~25 years ago I read the 'original' Han Solo Trilogy by Brian Daley and thought it was great stuff.
Those stories would make for a great, action-packed arc of a tv series.

This is way too long, and you've not credibly refuted anything I've said, so I'll post without Karma bonus to try and avoid the wrath of the mods.

Because in the documentary [...], [Larry Silverstein] made the following statement: "'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."

I'm not disputing that he said that (although I suspect he said "pull out," not "pull it"). But it is YOU and the website that are making the completely unsupported assumption that "pull it" means "demolish." In fact, when you read it in context, such an assumption doesn't even make sense. Why would he justify proactively demolishing it by saying "we've had such a terrible loss of life" already? Why not just evacuate to save lives, and wait and see if the building can be salvaged when the fire burns itself out? How would evacuating and then deliberately blowing it up save any lives? Don't you see? It makes no sense.

If that in fact is true, than it's the third steel-framed building to ever collapse from fire, the first two being WTC 1 and 2. The simple fact is: steel-framed buildings don't collapse from fire. Period.

You're illustrating my point for me exactly. This is exactly why the building architects were so surprised by the fact that they did collapse from fire. Everybody thought that was impossible. The steel frames of the buildings were coated with insulating foam to prevent exactly this scenario from playing out. But what they hadn't counted on was the fact that the buildings' ages and poor maintenance would effectively erase the safety built into the design. Again, I cite the documentary Why The Towers Fell for a very thorough and insightful explanation of how things transpired on that fateful day.

And the reason that those 3 buildings were the first 3 steel-framed buildings ever to collapse from fire is because they were all designed the same flawed way (as have been many more since then that thankfully haven't had massive fires to test them).

The towers were designed to constantly withstand wind pressures equal to 30 times the energy of the airliner impacts.

Quit with the red herring. The "energy of the airliner impacts" had nothing to do with it. It was the heat from the fire that brought down the buildings. The buildings did withstand the impact of the airliners, just as they should have.

In July of 1945 a B-52 bomber, lost in heavy fog, crashed into the Empire State Building.

First of all, it was a B-25, not a B-52. The B-52 hadn't even been invented yet, and is a MUCH bigger airplane. The B-25 that crashed into the Empire State Building was 53 feet long with a wingspan of 67 feet. The airliners that crashed into the twin towers were roughly 3 times as long with double the wingspan. Plus, the airliners were fully loaded with fuel for a cross-continent journey, whereas the little B-25 bomber was on its way home, and thus had relatively little fuel on board.

Oops. Guess you forgot about that part, eh? But let's not get bogged down in facts. Please, continue on.

[Where are all the people who were supposedly on the non-existent AA flight 77?]

I just love it when people throw this up as an 'argument'. Their bodies have not been found, and they never will be.

That's your answer? They existed, but they've simply vanished? All at the same time? Without anybody noticing? They were secretly diverted somewhere else and killed off in the name of freedom? I'm going to need a little more explanation than that, please. Who ordered this? Who were the people who carried it out? Why would American Airlines pilots and US military service men and women kidnap and murder innocent American citizens? A conspiracy this big would requi

What gave you that idea?

I LOVE the darth vader/death star lounge pants!

What gave you that idea?

I LOVE the darth vader/death star lounge pants!

What gave you that idea?

I LOVE the darth vader/death star lounge pants!

What gave you that idea?

I LOVE the darth vader/death star lounge pants!

What gave you that idea?

I LOVE the darth vader/death star lounge pants!

We just need to build a Ring Collapsiter around the Sun!

If he makes a film as good as his last one (or better), more folks will be in the know.

(Granted, a lot of people won't see it because it challenges what they already believe to be true. If you find such a person, do your patriotic duty. Kill them.)

Yeah... It's sad when paid writers can't get it right.

In The Twilight of American Culture (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039332169X/sr=8- 1/qid=1142947630/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3152913-4802223? _encoding=UTF8) Morris Berman points out the spelling mistakes in Roman graffiti near the fall of Rome, in addition to many other parallels with the current state of our empire.

Sorry, Silver Surfer was the code name for the 4th Dimension database package. Read Guy Kawasaki's The Macintosh Way for more detail.

HyperCard was originally called WildCard, hence the creator code 'WILD'.

... I think ugly has nothing to do with it. Nor does pretty - csszendesign.com (as mentioned elsewhere) courts graphic designers rather than interface engineers, and it shows. The sites there are magnificently beautiful and almost exclusively unusable.

To use a dating site may seem like a bad example, but I think it's perfect - simplicity, usability (or clicks that translate into instant results), and content that people want are all more important in the long run than pretty stuff. This is not to say that pretty isn't important for some - a corporate site should reflect an elegance that will breed confidence in the company itself. But any kind of down-and-dirty sales site should be content-first. It can be done attractively (amazon.com is, of course, a great example of simple-but-broad usability with a pleasant design), but content is what sells.

So an ugly dating site with pics of hot chicks will sell. The interface is worth picking through for visitors. An elegant and usable design without the pictures of hot chicks simply wouldn't work.

If you haven't already, read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug http://www.stevekrug.com/. It's a brilliant and simple gateway drug into the endless world of usability. First you read that, then you read his friend Lou Rosenberg's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and before you know it you're reading Edward Tufte and sneaking around behind your wife's back building XUL or Python apps.

Once you're hooked, read The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design and The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. The former ...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201517973/qid=11 42879216/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

... is ancient by web chronology, but it sure does offer insight into interface design (including a great article about building a touch screen for Koko the sign-language-taught gorilla). The latter ...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201379376/qid=11 42879290/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

... is what happens when you get so deeply into interface design that you forget that the average users need things to stick to some of the more common conventions (right or wrong). Still, it offers a great view of where to start thinking about maximum interface efficiency.

Point is, all of this usability information is great and very important to know if you do this stuff for a living for a broad range of clients. However, it's not the be-all-end-all when it comes to pure information transfer. If you can get a fast-loading site with fewer usability conventions to sell your widgets (in the example given, that shouldn't be hard), why add to load times or add to the potential problems users will have? Go ugly and let your content sell itself.

... I think ugly has nothing to do with it. Nor does pretty - csszendesign.com (as mentioned elsewhere) courts graphic designers rather than interface engineers, and it shows. The sites there are magnificently beautiful and almost exclusively unusable.

To use a dating site may seem like a bad example, but I think it's perfect - simplicity, usability (or clicks that translate into instant results), and content that people want are all more important in the long run than pretty stuff. This is not to say that pretty isn't important for some - a corporate site should reflect an elegance that will breed confidence in the company itself. But any kind of down-and-dirty sales site should be content-first. It can be done attractively (amazon.com is, of course, a great example of simple-but-broad usability with a pleasant design), but content is what sells.

So an ugly dating site with pics of hot chicks will sell. The interface is worth picking through for visitors. An elegant and usable design without the pictures of hot chicks simply wouldn't work.

If you haven't already, read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug http://www.stevekrug.com/. It's a brilliant and simple gateway drug into the endless world of usability. First you read that, then you read his friend Lou Rosenberg's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and before you know it you're reading Edward Tufte and sneaking around behind your wife's back building XUL or Python apps.

Once you're hooked, read The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design and The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. The former ...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201517973/qid=11 42879216/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

... is ancient by web chronology, but it sure does offer insight into interface design (including a great article about building a touch screen for Koko the sign-language-taught gorilla). The latter ...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201379376/qid=11 42879290/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

... is what happens when you get so deeply into interface design that you forget that the average users need things to stick to some of the more common conventions (right or wrong). Still, it offers a great view of where to start thinking about maximum interface efficiency.

Point is, all of this usability information is great and very important to know if you do this stuff for a living for a broad range of clients. However, it's not the be-all-end-all when it comes to pure information transfer. If you can get a fast-loading site with fewer usability conventions to sell your widgets (in the example given, that shouldn't be hard), why add to load times or add to the potential problems users will have? Go ugly and let your content sell itself.

Butt ugly, horrible backends and still rolling in dough.

Flipping through the various examples in The Zen of CSS Design , for example, I am amazed by how gorgeous some of the effects are, but I know that I'd be quickly worn out if I had to use any of these on a regular basis. Sometimes simple design, even to the point of blocky quasi-socialist-realist functionality, works better even if it doesn't win awards for looks.

Anime has already tackled this subject by none other than the creator of the pop-culture anime-film AKIRA.

Roujin Z ( See http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/630506251X/qid=11 42849877/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-2542910-4413459?_ encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=130 ) was an anime film about a computerized hospital bed that is supposed to care for an elderly patient. However, the computer turns out to be a prototype for a battle robot and to top it off, the damn thing takes on the personality of his former wife, and therein starts a chase through Japan, tearing up the countryside, as the bed tries to take the patient on a trip to the beach, one last time.

Overall, it's a pretty decent film and very amusing as well.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 BF74PS/104-4768764-3708755?v=glance The article is trying to rip on US cellphone companies for no reason. I have verizon and yes it sucks that they cripple all their phones... However, that phone IS available here, and there are many other simple phones out there as well... you get what you pay for.

Why not?

Because about 5 billion are using most of their thinking ability just to sustain themselves. And it's only going to get worse as the Earth's populstion increases and more and more resources are taxed to their limits. And no, I don't believe "technology", "advances", or any other sooth saying (cop-out) predictions will be able to rescue us. Saying so would be almost as foolish as saying that God will save us.

See: Diamond

Grant did, however write the book on making battlebots type robots... too bad it came out after the fad had died down.

I will not point you at the sites but there is literaly 100's of fan fictions for futurama not counting a whole legit comic book series.

Learn how to use links:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/ B00006BZ5W/ref=cm_rev_all_1/103-4818698-6196652?_e ncoding=UTF8&s=theweb

<URL:http://www.example.com/>

"One thing that most people dont understand as well is that most of us who are disabled in any way at all are dirt poor. It could be from medical bills, the lack of the ability to even work because of our disability, the fact that to most we are seen as less then human so people dont want to hire us for work we can do, or any number of other reasons. The fact is, most of us do not have much money and have a lot of free time on our hands. We could be open sources greatest contributors if the OOS community cared enough to do the things we cant to help us make the tools we need. Once our hungry minds have the option, you have no idea how much we will use it."

Job-Hunting for the So-Called Handicapped or People Who Have Disabilities by the person who gave us "What color is your parachute". Being "handicapped" is as much an attitude as it's a disability.

Wow, futuristic sci-fi AND there's a dragon on the cover!

You act like this is some breakthrough in "geekerature"; surely you're well-versed with "Principles of Compiler Design"?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201000229/002-99 15101-3712033?v=glance&n=283155

20 years ago, the novel Dream Park came out, where people played in a virtual reality combined with D&D style gaming. This is a step towards that, although not with all the cool toys in the novel.

Still, I think this is something we're going to see evolving. This isn't going to replace computer games, but might work as a supplement or a "next step up." I know there are times when I've wondered what it would be like to "play it the a real setting", and see if I could figure it out in real time, without "saves" or "replays". There are already "adventure role-playing games" being run like this, and adding the higher-tech might just be what the hardcore gamer would graduate to - and get them actually doing something besides exercising their fingers. :-)

"CD (650 - 800MB) - still useful for Music, install software and some backups. Look like hanging around for a long time. I doubt we will see a Music DVD put out by the Music Industry anytime soon."

Good news! Music DVD's are already here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-ur l/103-2594229-9324665?url=index%3Dmusic&search-typ e=quick-search&field-keywords=dvd-a

How to DJ Right by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster is easily the best text I have read about DJing. I had been DJing for quite a few years when I read this book and there was a lot of information which I found very useful.

My advice would be that if you are serious about learning, buy yourself some good second-hand technics decks. They have excellent re-sale value because they are built to last for years. I have some old second-hand 1200 Mk2s which I bought when I was living in England, and they have been moved around countless times and still are as good as the day I bought them. Even if you buy a cheaper mixer to start with, get the turntables right.

I'd also advise to get in with an online community of people that play the same sort of music as you want to. Not only is it handy for finding gems which you might not know about, when you get confident enough to start hosting your mixes online you will get some useful advise and criticism of your mixes.

Senators are once again pushing for a .XXX top-level domain to 'corral pornography'.

Pornography has become such a part of the Internet that I think having a domain explicitly for it a great idea. Then I read the rest of the article summary:

Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department.

Whoah. Hold on. Who gets to decide whether something is "harmful to minors"? There are too many legitimate businesses that sell adult-related things for this even to make sense. Congress, do you think an online store that sells vibrators and sex toys should move to .xx?

Oh, ok then.

In related news, the business formerly known as Amazon.com recently changed its logo to Amazon.xxx. A spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

The fact that legislation like this goes far enough to make the news digusts me. The government is NOT a nanny!

/Votes in a bill to bring personal responsibility back to America

Get a clue!

You don't have to buy new crap to make your music work on your iPod, guess what it's an MP3 player, it plays MP3s...
iTunes Music Store bought music is another matter, but you probably have to lay much on the blame for that on the studios as DRM is required by them to play the online music game.

Oh, and turntables? You can still get those... so dig out those LPs and have fun!

-n

It's strange that the findings turn out this way, because to judge by Eric S. Raymond's presentation of the open source idea in his influential The Cathedral and the Bazaar one gets the idea that hierarchies and control are bad and that anarchy is the most fruitful situation. Certainly the most well-known example of open-source, Mozilla, only got tied up for years due to its exclusivist design system.

Because Karl Popper states unequivocally in his seminal work the Logic of Scientific Discovery that only theories that are falsifiable are open to scientific evaluation. At such a point the theory holds that it cannot be falsified it is not longer science. Note the period.

Save yourself $5.10 by buying the book here: Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality (you even beat the B&N member price). And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $5.10 by buying the book here: Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality (you even beat the B&N member price). And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Yes, which is why I mention the S&M possibility. I wasn't a fan of high-end hot sauce 2nd hand on my Mister Happy (CBT not being my schtick), but I've been told my tastes are "fucking vanilla". While I'd be suprised if that many guys were that into a "bottom" role, YMMV.

In war-torn Manchuria of the 1930s, two lives briefly find peace over a game of go in Shan Sa's third novel, The Girl Who Played Go (translated by Adriana Hunter). The unnamed characters, a Japanese soldier stationed in China and a 16-year-old Manchurian girl, narrate their stories in alternating first-person chapters. For the girl, the struggles of Independent Manchuria take a back seat to her discovery of love and the awakening of her sexuality. For the soldier, his idealized dreams of samurai honor and imperial conquest are slowly displaced by homesickness, troubled recollections of his earthquake-torn youth, and remorse over a lost love. But the solitary concerns of each character are eventually submerged by the tides of war. The girl's first lover, Min, is a revolutionary. His ardor for his virgin conquest is matched by a doomed patriotism. Simultaneously, the soldier comes to relish the girl's home town, Thousand Winds, in Southern Manchuria, and becomes distrustful of his own nationalism. His daily games of go with the young female stranger awaken a new passion in him that becomes entwined with admiration for her aggressive play.

"Is it possible for people to sift through 10000 pieces of crap to find one useful/good item?"

Yes. That is what Google is for, that is what slashdot.org, del.icio.us, reddit.com, digg.com are all for. The whole facination with web 2.0 and social websites is that we are figuring out how to deal with this massive amount of content.

Don't worry, in the next couple years there will be excellent technological solutions to finding good jazz music.

It is easy to point out how much crap there is, but it is foolish to point out how capable we are at sorting through it. This argument is older than we may think, look back to the medieval times when only monks were allowed to read and write. They worried that if everyone could write the world would be flooded with the ideas of a bunch of stupid peasants. How would they ever find what was a good book and what was a bad book? Well, we certainly dealt with that, and we already are dealing with the internet.

Information overload is a fallacy, people take what they want. If I can't handle reading all the blogs I get linked too, I'll just read the ones I like. If I need to find an AJAX tutorial, wikipedia and google do a good job of finding the answer.

There is a wisdom in crowds, if the system is set up right (I recommend the http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385721706/sr=8-1 /qid=1142610470/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-7606918-8820101?_ encoding=UTF8book)

The internet is a great medium for rapidly communicating, not just content, but also the value of content. Don't worry if music recommendation isn't quite there yet now, I would bet money that it will be the most reliable recommendation system behind websites and images in the comming years.

...they're putting out the iDog Nano...

Must be a slimmer, smaller version of this.

Grab a copy of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near and find out where we are, and where we're headed. It's a great read!

--Rob

If you're tired of all the traditional North American board games, I've recently discovered that there's plenty of great European games, such as Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, and many others. Just check out your local game shop.

They're more expensive than the standard fare from Parker Brothers but they're a lot more fun and re-playable.

If you're tired of all the traditional North American board games, I've recently discovered that there's plenty of great European games, such as Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, and many others. Just check out your local game shop.

They're more expensive than the standard fare from Parker Brothers but they're a lot more fun and re-playable.

If you're tired of all the traditional North American board games, I've recently discovered that there's plenty of great European games, such as Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, and many others. Just check out your local game shop.

They're more expensive than the standard fare from Parker Brothers but they're a lot more fun and re-playable.

Woman screaming in the middle of the night

Why?

Because cunnilingus is not so fun when the tongue hitting your clit is still swathed in hot sauce that is 100x hotter than anything you can buy at Safeway.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002ZBPGQ/002-27 72924-7220044?v=glance&n=1036592 It's so tough. Cats or protstate cancer. Cats or prostate cancer. Meh.. lets I'll go with masterbating. Have to keep the pet population down.

this one, and then this one. ;)

/flame-off

//kept pushing my host to install PHP5 for months, before I got on the train