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This book is worth reading:

"A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market", by John Allen Paulos.

He explains how a market can aggregate information efficiently (and how it sometimes doesn't). He doesn't cover some of the chaos theory experimental results I have read about elsewhere, but other than that, it's a wonderful and fun book to read.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465054811/qid=11 40328404/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-4569797-48609 03?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Someone hit that guy over the head with a copy of 1984.

A better book to jam down their throats would be Lacey and His Friends, by David Drake, a collection of stories built around a world where surveillance is mandatory and omnipresent -- no matter where you go, you have cameras recording every action you take, and everything you do, down to the last grunt on the thundermug, is recorded and can be reviewed later if you are believed to have committed a crime.

While a handheld pen-sized scanner may intrigue, it's not very new, not even for this particular device. If you go to the amazon.com review of this device, and look and see the oldest review for this device is in October of 2004!

Additionally, while there are only fifteen reviews, the average is only 3.5/5 stars, enough of an indicator (to me at least) this isn't exciting or very interesting technology (for the record, a running theme at amazon seems to indicate a klunky package with difficult to use software and controls). Also fifteen reviews over a 15 month period would indicate a product that isn't moving. Perhaps this review is a nudge to try and get the product moving?

Read this book. What he did falls right into one of the topics discussed in the about pursuading people. When you give someone a reason to do something you want them to do, it dramatically increases the chance that they will comply. Just saying "Give me money" or "Can I use the copier first" doesn't cut it. But something like "Give me a raise, because I want to buy a house in a better neighborhood" or "Can I use the copier first because I'm in a hurry" is much more effectual.

I suggest you go read Freakonomics, where they tackle the myth of crack-dealers earning lots and lots of cash. Those who peddle the stuff on the street are actually low-income earners. Non-comission Amazon link here.

The Anarchist Cookbook...

I'm surprised that so far all of the buzz has been about passenger transport and ignores other applications. The science fiction writer Michael Flynn's future history starting with Firestar has FedEx as one of the first industries signing on to the new convenient space flight. Think about how much of an edge on its competition a company would have if it could deliver a package anywhere on Earth in just a couple of hours.

READ THIS BOOK.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1580083102/ref=pd _sim_b_1/002-6822999-5302459?_encoding=UTF8&v=glan ce&n=283155

It's a handbook of negotiating techniques with specific regard to salary and job prospecting.

The golden rule?
WHOEVER GOES FIRST LOSES. Don't EVER be the first to mention a number.

The book is incredible, it really is. There are at least three different techniques for dealing with the "what are you currently making" question.

If you do nothing else before you have your next interview, read the book. If it doesn't help you, I'll buy it from you. I re-read the whole thing before EVERY interview to brush up.

I don't want to seem overenthusiastic, but this is one of the few things I can say works without a doubt. It's one of the most important books I've read in my entire career.

Read The Hot Zone and you'll never make such a drastically wrong statement about Ebola ever again. It's some seriously nasty shit. In fact, if you just read the excerpt about Charles Monet's infection and eventual death, it will probably set you straight.

Ebola makes liquid smoothies out of people, and the scare in Reston in 1989 shows how drastic an epidemic could be. If a strain of Ebola resembling Zaire in lethality towards humans and the airborne characteristics of Reston were to evolve, it would be a bad day for a lot of people.

Read this book. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385479565/103-56 67832-1909461?v=glance&n=283155 One of the quotes from the CDC official when asked how he felt about sums it how. "How does 'shit scared' grab you?"

That's because it's a laptop, made up of non-sony components. & from the sounds of it, the one drm specific sony piece of hardware it has doesn't work, and is probably illegal to reverse engineer.

Limited copyright is an essential element to maintaining a consistent creative human spirit. By allowing works to be protected for a limited amount of time, the artist can comfortably turn some profit on their creation. But by allowing that protection to lapse, another creator can pick up the work of the original artist and manipulate it, turning it into something different. The whole of human creativity depends on building upon the works of others.

It's pretty frightening to think about the incredible lengths that IP holders are going to these days to increase the length of copyright ever further, all in the name of limited, short-term profits. They represent an immeasurable threat. Think about it: if copyright never expired, where would the motivation to innovate come from? There would be none, if you could indefinitely profit from one or two ideas.

your subconscious mind is a better decision maker than you are

I think that our conscious mind is more like a floating point processor than a cpu. It's very good at certain specialized problems, and very weak at most other things. Anybody who has tried to learn any kind of athletic skill knows that the conscious mind is simply lousy at controlling the body.

I also think that most of the time, our conscious mind is like the little kids you sometimes see in an arcade happily jerking the joystick around playing a video game--except that he never put in a quarter, and he's really "playing" the attract mode. I suspect that very often, what we perceive as our motivation is little more than an educated guess, made by a neural subsystem that has very little access to the ancient parts of our brain that actually motivate most of our actions.

Wegner makes the case that the conscious mind does not really make decisions, and that the experience of conscious decision making is an illusion, a kind of event tagging by which our brain distinguishes between those events that we are (probably) responsible for and those that are outside our control.

Speaking of, now I finally have a viable excuse to sleep at my desk!

"No sir, I wasn't slacking - I was making decisions more efficiently!" I love it. :-)

On a more serious note, if you haven't read Gladwell's "Blink" yet, you should. It'an awesome (and fun to read) treatise on the power of the unconscious mind. Similar to Pinker's "The Language Instinct", but more accessible and tries to be less persuasive.

Speaking of, now I finally have a viable excuse to sleep at my desk!

"No sir, I wasn't slacking - I was making decisions more efficiently!" I love it. :-)

On a more serious note, if you haven't read Gladwell's "Blink" yet, you should. It'an awesome (and fun to read) treatise on the power of the unconscious mind. Similar to Pinker's "The Language Instinct", but more accessible and tries to be less persuasive.

Looks like a linux developer will be coming out with a gimp manual soon. I think she based it on a gimp course she taught online .

If you're into this topic I just finished a book that I highly recommend. It's a fairly quick read and touches on various facets of snap-judgements to get you informed and whet your appetite for analyzing your own decision making.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Save yourself some money by buying the book here: Linux Multimedia Hacks. And if you use the "secret" A9.com Instant Reward discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself some money by buying the book here: Linux Multimedia Hacks. And if you use the "secret" A9.com Instant Reward discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Amazon Has it cheaper than B & N. ($19.77 new, 13.12 used).

"Why is there such a fundamental disconnect between the engineers and *everyone* else in a business environment?"

The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation : A Collection of Readings (Paperback) answers that question.

Executable UML is a major innovation in the field of software development. It is designed to produce a comprehensive and understandable model of a solution independent of the organization of the software implementation. It is a highly abstract thinking tool that aids in the formalization of knowledge, and is also a way of describing the concepts that make up abstract solutions to software development problems.

This timely new book, Executable UML: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, thoroughly introduces, documents, and explains this important new technology. The authors show how UML can formalize requirements and use cases into a rich set of verifiable diagrams, how it can be used to produce executable and testable models, and how these models can be translated directly into code. In addition, the book explains how individual system domains are woven together by an executable UML model compiler.

The book is full of tips and techniques to help you:

        * Partition a system into subject matters based on individual aspects
        * Pick the right level for use case modeling to speed subject matter comprehension
        * Model classes and focus on relationships to capture subject matter semantics precisely
        * Express behavior using the newly adopted UML action semantics and action languages
        * Specify constraints using tags specified in OCL (Object Constraint Language)

In addition, this book tackles topics of particular importance in execution, such as how to:

        * Synchronize objects by building lifecycles using statechart diagrams
        * Model relationships and contention safely
        * Distribute dynamics to avoid unmaintainable controller objects
        * Verify the models by executing test cases against the statechart diagrams and constraints

A large-scale, fully developed case study runs throughout the book to illustrate concepts and techniques.

I recently read Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking which discusses this in more detail. Basically, people with a great deal of experience in a subject develop a gut feeling that is most likely accurate and much faster than trying to analyze why they came to that conclusion. Much of this does happen at a subconscious level, whether awake or asleep.

Yeah, but investors who realize that people will always budget for their vices first get better ROI.

Here's a link to the Sony system at Amazon.

It's $1800 for the whole thing (you can't get the CD changer/ripper separately it seems).

You can find it if you look, like at Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005JG6X/103-45 08192-4394218?v=glance&n=130

I just got the BT headphones from HP, and they seem to be all three. Of course "stylish" is the big problem, as there is no accounting for taste.

Sure technology will solve some of our pressing resource problems. But it will cause additional unforseen ones, as it always has in the past.

Every resource-exhaustion problem we have is a result of technology, even if it's just the simple technology of the agriculture of 1000 years ago which allowed the population to grow. Check out Jared Diamond's Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Yeah, I know it's a bummer to actually have to deal with reality. But it's better than having reality deal with you, without using the time you've been given to prepare. If the bummer gets too big, learn to meditate for a mental break.

Me, I downshift my lifestyle. If I had a 295 hp car I'd drive using about 60 of those hp, to save gas. (I have a 5.0 liter SUV, so I'm in the same boat. I cruise at 55 instead of 70.) No regrets for buying the SUV, but now I know more and I'm damned if I'll buy another. But part of downshifting is sticking with the old beast and just driving it less and slower, rather than spending $20K on a Prius or some other little car. But if the beast blows up, I'll seize the opportunity to make a substantial change. And of course I'm downshifting in a hundred other ways too. Beans are actually pretty good if you cook them with salsa and brocolli, and serve them over rice!

Huh? What are you talking about, almost every single camera on that page lists IEEE 1394.

The ones that don't have it listed probably almost all HAVE it, it's just such a standard feature that they don't bother giving it top billing anymore. It's practially assumed on anything that's MiniDV.

Many of them have, in addition to FireWire, USB connections, usually for downloading still pictures using proprietary software or drivers. It's what I would consider a completely useless feature, but it fills space on the outside of the box I guess, and apparently somebody thinks it's a good idea. I'm not sure whether you can actually download the full-quality DV stream through the USB port, but I doubt it. On the cameras I've used (mostly small Sonys) they have a built in DV-to-MPEG converter, and they put the MPEG stream out the USB port, so you can have pre-shrunk movies for email or webcam use.

Just as an example from that list, the Canon Optura 600 isn't listed as having IEEE1394 or FireWire, it just says USB 2.0. But if we go to the Amazon page for the same item, we read: "Otherwise known as Firewire or iLink, the Optura 600's IEEE 1394 DV Terminal is a high-speed digital interface that ensures virtually no loss of video or audio quality when transferring videos to a computer. Simply use a DV cable to connect the camcorder to your computer's DV Terminal and you can be sure that your favorite, recorded moments retain their pristine image and sound." Furthermore, in regards to the USB port: "Quickly transfer images from the Optura 600 to a computer with the USB 2.0 High Speed Terminal."

So basically, the USB capabilities on there are just fluff -- they're for transferring still photos that are taken onto the memory cards to your computer, and on the higher end cameras they'll sometimes do video. But the real video transport is FireWire/IEEE1394, and probably always will be for MiniDV. The whole 1394 system was designed as an interconnect for DV equipment, and I don't think you're going to get all the players in USB together and invent an alternative, with all the stuff that's already in existence.

The only exception I can think of are the DVD based camcorders down at the bottom of the page, which really aren't "DV" at all, they're MPEG2. And as you'll find out if you read some of the owner comments from people who've bought them, there isn't a particularly good way of getting the video into your PC anyway -- basically you have to rip it off the DVD.

The best you're gonna get out of Microsoft is the Office Student/Teacher Edition, which costs about $125. Hint: You don't have to be a student or teacher to buy a copy.

Dear Mr. Bezos (can I call you Jeff?),

I think the idea of selling music players preloaded with music is really, really great. Totally. But I don't think you need to cannibalize your existing business to do it.

Take a look at your company's "Top Sellers" page for electronics.

Note that six of the top ten are iPods. (The others are lower-price, and probably lower-profit, items.)

(You might also note that seven of the top ten items on your company's "Top Sellers" page for computers happen to be Apple products. See a trend?)

You, of all people, know that people want iPods. And you're more than happy to sell them to them. Lots and lots and lots of them.

Soooo... I hope you're also talking to Apple about this idea. Yes, their DRM doesn't really work well with the idea of a new portable device showing up with music on it that's not on the user's computer... but then, does anyone's?

But if you asked, I bet they'd be willing to help you set up some sweet bundles of iPods and high-ticket iTunes Music Store cards, with a nice margin built in for you. After all, you move a lot of kit for them.

And maybe Steve and Bono would even let you be on stage with them sometime. Wouldn't that be neat?

Dear Mr. Bezos (can I call you Jeff?),

I think the idea of selling music players preloaded with music is really, really great. Totally. But I don't think you need to cannibalize your existing business to do it.

Take a look at your company's "Top Sellers" page for electronics.

Note that six of the top ten are iPods. (The others are lower-price, and probably lower-profit, items.)

(You might also note that seven of the top ten items on your company's "Top Sellers" page for computers happen to be Apple products. See a trend?)

You, of all people, know that people want iPods. And you're more than happy to sell them to them. Lots and lots and lots of them.

Soooo... I hope you're also talking to Apple about this idea. Yes, their DRM doesn't really work well with the idea of a new portable device showing up with music on it that's not on the user's computer... but then, does anyone's?

But if you asked, I bet they'd be willing to help you set up some sweet bundles of iPods and high-ticket iTunes Music Store cards, with a nice margin built in for you. After all, you move a lot of kit for them.

And maybe Steve and Bono would even let you be on stage with them sometime. Wouldn't that be neat?

"Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent."

How exactly is demand measured? Does he mean consumption? Consumption must equal production, otherwise we would be rapidly draining/filling enormous reserve tanks. Current production is around 70 million barrels per day. Overproduction of 3% would fill a large oil tanker every day with nowhere to go.

This is a common misunderstanding in talking about oil production. "Oh no, we're consuming 100% of the oil we produce. The world will end next Tuesday!". Do you buy twice the food you need at the grocery store? Will you starve if you have company over next week and your demand goes up? No, you will buy (drill/research) more food when you need it.

And did we really need a graph to show linear interpolation between 0.9812 trillion and 1.00748 trillion barrels? The author assumed that the total world supply of oil started at 2.013 trillion barrels, so the halfway point would be reached in 2005. The production rate stayed near his estimate, so the halfway point stayed in 2005. Wow. December 16, 2005 is a day which will live in infamy. Unless of course his supply estimate was off by 0.5%. Then February 28, 2006 shall be a day which will live in infamy. Obviously, the author of Beyond Oil is just trying to sell more copies of Beyond Oil.

I do believe that the world's energy future needs attention. I think we'd be wise to invest $100 billion in fusion and renewable energy, rather than spending ten times that on destroying and rebuilding nations. But I don't think crying wolf is a wise way to change policy.

AlpineR

"Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent."

How exactly is demand measured? Does he mean consumption? Consumption must equal production, otherwise we would be rapidly draining/filling enormous reserve tanks. Current production is around 70 million barrels per day. Overproduction of 3% would fill a large oil tanker every day with nowhere to go.

This is a common misunderstanding in talking about oil production. "Oh no, we're consuming 100% of the oil we produce. The world will end next Tuesday!". Do you buy twice the food you need at the grocery store? Will you starve if you have company over next week and your demand goes up? No, you will buy (drill/research) more food when you need it.

And did we really need a graph to show linear interpolation between 0.9812 trillion and 1.00748 trillion barrels? The author assumed that the total world supply of oil started at 2.013 trillion barrels, so the halfway point would be reached in 2005. The production rate stayed near his estimate, so the halfway point stayed in 2005. Wow. December 16, 2005 is a day which will live in infamy. Unless of course his supply estimate was off by 0.5%. Then February 28, 2006 shall be a day which will live in infamy. Obviously, the author of Beyond Oil is just trying to sell more copies of Beyond Oil.

I do believe that the world's energy future needs attention. I think we'd be wise to invest $100 billion in fusion and renewable energy, rather than spending ten times that on destroying and rebuilding nations. But I don't think crying wolf is a wise way to change policy.

AlpineR

Bernsein's complete recordings of Gustav Mahler for Deutsche Grammophon, $47.98 plus $35.99 plus $39.98 for a total of $123.95 (yes, that's my latest purchase).

Affordable? moar liek exploitable amirite?

Bernsein's complete recordings of Gustav Mahler for Deutsche Grammophon, $47.98 plus $35.99 plus $39.98 for a total of $123.95 (yes, that's my latest purchase).

Affordable? moar liek exploitable amirite?

Bernsein's complete recordings of Gustav Mahler for Deutsche Grammophon, $47.98 plus $35.99 plus $39.98 for a total of $123.95 (yes, that's my latest purchase).

Affordable? moar liek exploitable amirite?

Buy a legit copy for $6.50

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000002H97/ ref=dp_olp_2/002-0716359-5497615?_encoding=UTF8

Oops, it's used. Well, I tried to help them.

For those interested in what this article claimed to be about (from the post), might I suggest a few people with a sense of humor, a case of beer, and this.

Save yourself some money by buying the book here: Hacking Digital Cameras.

Porn will be illegal soon? Yeah, you're right... I have been noticing a severe drop in the number of porn sites recently. Online porn is a $3 billion business, which means it has a lot of clout. There is no way a buisiness that brings in that kind of money will let itself be legislated out of existance (Cigarettes are way more harmfull than Porn, but cig corporations are still making a ton of money).

Look at my email address. I know a little bit about this topic.

The so-called social conservatives are smarter than to outright outlaw porn -- instead, they're concentrating on making the regulatory burdens so great that it's impossible to produce or distribute porn in the US legally. A subtle distinction, but an important one. For instance, if the FSC loses the court battle over the new 2257 regulations, US companies won't be able to accept foreign passports as proof of age. Worse, a company in Los Angeles shooting porn overseas would have to have someone in their Los Angeles office at any hour, day or night, when shooting was taking place overseas. You want to go to work at 3am and sit around waiting for an inspection?

I know several people who have sold their adult businesses to overseas concerns for fear of prosecution here in the US. Not for anything illegal, just for basic porn. Even more people are moving their servers overseas, which I personally think is pointless, but some people believe it will help.

Believe what you want, but there is a well funded, very intelligently run effort to get rid of porn in general in the US, not just on the internet. It's hopeless and stupid, of course, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous

As for free speech, who needs laws? Heard about NTFU?. They got shut down for posting pics from Iraq. Government landed on them with both feet with a 300 or so obscenity charges; got the guy jailed without bail (!), got a plea bargain, got the site shut down. No more unauthorized pics from Iraq.

So snide insinuations aside and generally smugly superior tone aside, what are your credentials for being knowledgeable in this area? Do you think the new Supreme Court will uphold the 10th circuit's Sundance ruling? Can I suggest some reading?

-b

Here's a cool documentary on the topic: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005JG6X/002-77 57987-7540014?v=glance&n=130

Does the firm have any ideas on how to avoid tremendous death and destruction if this immensely long cable were to fall to the Earth, possibly hitting certain areas twice as badly if it were long enough to wrap more than once around? Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars has an especially disconcerting description of this happening. This sort of technology is exciting, I just hope enough attention is being paid to safety.

I have eMagin's Z800 3dVisor (It is from the company that came out with the borglike EyeBud prototype at CES)

The Z800 is the real deal for $900, with dual 800x600 OLED displays which are much better higher quality than LCDs at that small size. If you have followed HMDs, it is a big leap in quality for under $1000. Stereoscopic 3d with headtracking in First Person shooters and flight sims is really cool. I haven't tried any MMORPGs with it. You can find out more about at their website.

Next to General Agamemmnon, he was the most ruthless of the Titans during the Butlerian Jihad.

This somehow reminds me of Tom Tucker's apology on a season 2 episode of Family Guy. I wonder what this guy did to seek an apology?

Now in an act of contrition, I will insert this electrode into my brain... Oh God, oh God, it's burning out my eyelids from the inside!

ENIAC also caused the world's oldest flame war. See here.
Art and Alice Burks both worked close to the ENIAC project (Art Burks designed much of it), and Jean Bartik was the head programmer. Here we have three people intimately involved with the creation of computers, and, as of 2004, arguing about it on the internet.

I'm telling you, the world of Snow Crash is becoming a reality faster and faster. I always forget how old that book is (1992!), it's turning out to be pretty visionary! I'm off to buy my Metaverse deck...

I hope its better then the virtualboy from nintendo.

Um, yeeeeaah. Homebrew VR equipment was available in far better quality than the Virtual Boy at the time of its release. As the Virtual Reality Contruction Kit by Joe Gradecki explained, a simple, hi-res Head Mounted Display could be built by canabalizing parts from a portable television or laptop display. Given that homebrewers tended to lack sophisticated tools, it was generally recommended that homebrewers build a single screen device rather than trying to work out the optics for a dual-display device. (One display for each eye.) However, he did include instructions for building such a device, though the optics weren't cheap.

The data glove was easily supplied by purchasing a Nintendo Power Glove and building a NES -> Parallel port adaptor. Such an adaptor was nothing more than a matter of soldering a few wires together. (I still have mine stitched together with electrical tape. I was too lazy to solder it after testing. :P) The communications protocol used by the Power Glove had long been decoded, so programming for it was quite easy.

His book also contained instructions on how to build a HMD boom for position tracking, and how to code for these devices. All released before the market had even heard of the Virtual Boy.

What you say about getting soldiers past the point of firing (or firing AT something) is true, and the DoD has known about it since WWII, and changed training methods specifically to get past the 90% rate of ineffective fire they saw there. Bullseyes were replaced with more man-like targets and many more sophisticated changes were made. The resulting shift in effective fire to near the 90% level is credited by the professor of psychology at Westpoint as the reason for the increase in post-traumatic stress disorder after Vietnam.

Anyone really interested in this subject should read On Killing, because it covers the subject very well and even talks about the role of FPSs in the "training" of civilians. You may not agree with its contents, but it may change the way you think about modern warfare.