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In the case of the Bible, the license ... prohibits one from changing the source to help prevent bugs from creeping in. A lot folks have ignored this restriction, resulting in much chaos, but that's another story.

Indeed, at this point the project's archive contains more branches than a burning bush!

My off-topic question that sort of remains on-topic is this: [...] does anyone know of good websites where I can upload my photographs and let others "compete" openly to making them look better?

Seriously. Someone needs to buy that author a copy of The Elements of Style. Lanier couldn't write a clear sentence if his life depended on it.

Perhaps they confused the Zombies!!! card game with being a video game.

I'm not so sure that the book is necessarily a must-read for those looking to get an internship. From the author's blog, it looks like it's simply an eclectic collection of "profiles" from soon-to-be-graduates that are in the market for an internship or full-time job. Heck, I could've written this book too. In fact, anyone with sufficient interviewing experience (which isn't hard to come by if you're going through recruiting in your senior year of college) can give the same advice. The book is just a collection of these experiences, re-hashed and aggregated into print form. Oh well, if you really want to check it out you can see it here too: Landing the Internship or Full-Time Job During College.

Regardless, it's certainly possible to cross the USA on non-Interstate roads.

not only is it possible, there's a great book about doing it called blue highways

Printer and Xerox music

The User - Symphony #2 For Dot Matrix Printers:
http://www.emusic.com/album/10735/10735064.html

Xerophonics:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008NGDB/qid=11 36825794/sr=11-1/103-5928890-1815068

I don't know what you mean about bundles. I mean you can get a great deal right now on a 360. Hell, if you buy that system with the extra third wireless controller, you *save*! By my calculations you Toys R Us saves you exactly erm...$0. That's not the point though, you can have your XBox360 now!! Limited time only!

When Robert Heinlein published Expanded Universe, he reprinted an old story of his called "Blowups Happen". In his forword to that story he noted how over blown the TMI incident was.

"RADIATION EXPOSURE"

Half-mile from the Three-Mile plant ... 83 millirems
At the plant ... 1,100 millirems
During heart catheterization for an angiogram ... 45,000 millirems
~which I underwent 18 months ago. I feel fine.
R.A.H."

If you weren't so busy basking in your own genius, you might have heard of the classic How to lie with statistics.

What the Web won't be like in 10 years? (1997)

So much for corporations being less in control at the hands of the communities.

Last time I checked the railroad business is still there. Passenger service? No. Not profitable.* Speedy delivery? Others can do it better.**

But if you need tens, hundreds or thousands of metric tons of stuff delivered to your factory, rail is the answer.

Also note, that they do know they are in the transport business. Google "CSX Intermodal". Guess what the "intermodal" is for. Guess how some of those shipping containers from .jp get to remote places like, I dunno, Las Vegas. (Mind you, they have screwed up the "vision thing" a number of times in the recent past. One of the improvements they've made is going from "leave the railyard when there are enough boxcars to justify the cost" to "leave on time, no matter what". Welcome to the "Just In Time" paradigm.)

Rail isn't particularly short sighted either. Guess who laid down the first network of interconnected nodes passing packets of information via wire? Yeah, those guys.***

-r.

*almost never is. Check out the accounting for public transportation sometimes. Heck, check out how frequently airlines file bankruptcy. You saw levels of churn and mergers like that in the rail business when it was new. It's a "mature industry" now. "Mature" meaning "you won't lose your shirt if you invest in it. Kinda the opposite of Bubble 2.0

**DHL, FedEx, et. al.

***slightly exaggerated. See http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0425171698/002-91 94285-4968852?v=glance&n=283155 Not an affiliate link.

Go read

She could research the early history of cryptology (i.e., World War 2). Although I haven't read the book yet, When Computers Were Human could serve as a starting point.

No, the in-between space is the taint. An in-between hole would either be an anal fistula or a vaginal fistula. A super massive black hole would be goatse, and a standard black hole has already wiped out more crap than you would care to consider. A wormhole is a vaginal-to-anal fistula, and hyperspace gate triggers are made by Hitachi.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow when we offer penetrating insights into what trans-dimensional travel implies for space-borne dildo use.

First off thanks for the great responses. This is an excellent reason for why i like the slashdot discussions. Instead of just getting into pointless bashing all the time - I actually can learn a lot.

Thanks, I appreciate considered discourse as well.

You seem to think it strange to extrapolate from my "mundane experiences" to the rest of the world - but I think that it's rationally more sound than the alternative. If we disregard our own experiences doesn't that make us completely credulous?

All true, but it seems me that you are over-projecting from your first hand knowledge. What prompted me to chime in was your assertion that "there are probably many people who could do what Steve is doing" which I definitely do not find to be credible. (Substitute Bill Gates or Jack Welch or other luminaries in your assertion I quoted, and I will still disagree with you!)

So I'm still somewhat skeptical. In my experience I've always felt that fundamentally people are people. This means they all operate on some relatively similar principles, but that they are all similarly irreducibly complex.

Consider (but just briefly) a history you know well. Would your church exist were it not for the very individual contributions of Joseph Smith and of Brigham Young?

To some extent what you say about great leaders holds true, but on the other hand we will never know how many Alexander the Greats or Napoleons never saw an army,

I believe those two men would have been tremendous leaders in just about any time or place. If around today, they probably would be in business! They probably would not have achieved the same historical recognition of course.

or how many Einsteins spent their lives in manual labor.

I believe that number is probably close to zero. For example, the influence of an Einstein in North America a few millennia ago might leave history only with the myth of Iktomi. Can I prove that? No, of course not, but such supposition is less preposterous than imagining an individual like Einstein living his life in ignominy, merely given different circumstances.

I'm willing to accept that there are extraordinary people - but at the same time I think that heroes and villains are largely products of the human attempt to impose narrative on our history. We need antagonists and protagonists - they are an essential element of the human experience even if they are not an essential element of objective reality.

Ah, but heros and villians clearly exist at some point in time, why not ours? Sure, history magnifies their influenece, just as time makes invisible the work of so many others. There is even a New Testament verse about how difficult it is to recognize a contemporary prophet! Yes, luck counts for a lot (that is the lesson of Accedential Empires, but that hardly diminishes the influence of indivuals.

But I'm eager to look into your references, and I appreciate them.

Two Samsung 214T 21" flat panels will run you about $1500.

I would also strongly recommend her pursuing the quantum computing idea. When I was in high school (just a few years ago) I wrote a quantum computing algorithm that analyzed the effects quantum computing will have on hash functions. I also made modifications to a quantum simulator (written in C, run on a linux laptop) for a more "experimental" and tangible final project. I recommend starting out with a book: "A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000AXRTYM/qid=1 136705266/sr=8-8/ref=pd_bbs_8/104-0428655-4663948? n=507846&s=books&v=glance) to think about which cryptology problems could be solved with a quantum computer.

Last I checked, Microsoft doesn't allow you to install Windows on multiple machines unless you have a site or multinode license. Not to worry, because the software is widely available at substantial discounts:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 22PTI4/qid=1136695728/sr=8-3/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-3452 583-1992700?v=glance&s=software

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 0AZJVC/qid=1136695778/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-3452 583-1992700?v=glance&s=software

Now add this to the $500 replacement cost of a new machine (which would likely be better in every respect than the one you're installing on).

Last I checked, Microsoft doesn't allow you to install Windows on multiple machines unless you have a site or multinode license. Not to worry, because the software is widely available at substantial discounts:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 22PTI4/qid=1136695728/sr=8-3/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-3452 583-1992700?v=glance&s=software

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 0AZJVC/qid=1136695778/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-3452 583-1992700?v=glance&s=software

Now add this to the $500 replacement cost of a new machine (which would likely be better in every respect than the one you're installing on).

Today I noticed Amazon seems to have picked the HD-DVD side, they have a whole section hyping it. Meanwhile, a search for "blu-ray" yields just a half dozen eBook articles scattered amongest unrelated items and a "Did you mean 'Blue Ray'?"

Maybe it will be the retailers, and not the content providers or consumers, that really pick the standard that wins. Would the average consumer pick a Blu-Ray player if Wal-Mart chose to only sell HD-DVD titles?

You meet an important character, one who has traits and characteristics--not a throwaway--and two scenes later they're dead.

I'm more interested in hearing when they start packing full seasons of standard-definition content onto a single disc that they can sell for a reasonable price, instead of the >$100 prices that some sets have been going for. (I.e. $338 for CSI on Amazon)

With H.264 encoding allegedly taking up half the space of MPEG-4 ASP/DivX, which itself takes up roughly 1/7th the space of MPEG-2 DVDs (assuming a 650M CD DivX holds the 2hr content of a 4.5GB movie) -- that's 28 hrs of content on a 4.5G DVD, or 140 hrs of content on a 23GB BD disc!)

...and since this is Slashdot, I should mention that if you pick up a BluRay player or buy MPAA movies, you should take up Lessig's challenge and donate an equal amount of money to the EFF... </obYRO>

Personally, I think the two big problems are a) light gathering in most astrophotography is far better than the human eye is capable of, and b) there's a lot of 'false-color' imaging that isn't adequately labeled as such. The famous 'Pillars of Creation' image isn't a real-light image; it's a combination of several (non-RGB) filters. (Of course, it's still beautiful.)

Many books now, though, give real depictions of what objects will look like through scopes and binoculars, or at least point out the difference. I'm thinking specifically of The Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide by H. C. Pennington and The Backyard Astronomers' Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer. These books show M42 are a slight blotch of white against the black, and explain that that's what you'll see when you're not using cameras with long exposure times.

You state the the assumption that there are many people who could do what Steve is doing is plainly incorrect because the US can not find a compelling candidate for president. That's flawed logic.

I cite that example as proof by demonstration that exemplary leaders are rare in general, not just in business. But politics being so corrupt, I understand how you missed my point.

I'm also not willing to follow your logic that Steve Jobs is a giant among insects - which seems to be your claim.

I find the example of Steve Jobs to be compelling even considering that the technology field offers many brilliant, interesting, and influential characters. The CEOs of these businesses are inevitably talented peoples. But even among these, Steve Jobs' track record is remarkable.

Finally if the influence of personality of the CEO on the organization as a whole is well documented than I am generally interested in reading more about it.

How about you start with Jack?

I'm not interested in hearing people try to tell me that Bill Gates is a tyrant out for world domination - especially if those same people are telling me that deep down Steve Jobs just wants to deliver quality products. Those are not people - those are caricatures.

When one reads widely, the same characterizations keep coming up, from disparate and varied source. Your skepticism is understandable, but the facts are dramatic enough to inspire two documentaries!

In my day to day experience the people I meet are neither angels nor demons.

So you extrapolate your mundane experiences to the rest of the world? Your homily is more true than false, but most famous people are notorious for valid reasons.

You state the the assumption that there are many people who could do what Steve is doing is plainly incorrect because the US can not find a compelling candidate for president. That's flawed logic.

I cite that example as proof by demonstration that exemplary leaders are rare in general, not just in business. But politics being so corrupt, I understand how you missed my point.

I'm also not willing to follow your logic that Steve Jobs is a giant among insects - which seems to be your claim.

I find the example of Steve Jobs to be compelling even considering that the technology field offers many brilliant, interesting, and influential characters. The CEOs of these businesses are inevitably talented peoples. But even among these, Steve Jobs' track record is remarkable.

Finally if the influence of personality of the CEO on the organization as a whole is well documented than I am generally interested in reading more about it.

How about you start with Jack?

I'm not interested in hearing people try to tell me that Bill Gates is a tyrant out for world domination - especially if those same people are telling me that deep down Steve Jobs just wants to deliver quality products. Those are not people - those are caricatures.

When one reads widely, the same characterizations keep coming up, from disparate and varied source. Your skepticism is understandable, but the facts are dramatic enough to inspire two documentaries!

In my day to day experience the people I meet are neither angels nor demons.

So you extrapolate your mundane experiences to the rest of the world? Your homily is more true than false, but most famous people are notorious for valid reasons.

Some day's entries are visual objects, some are binocular, some are telescope, and some are 'here's what's there if you could see it.'

A great book for the casually curious. You could call it 'astronomy bait.' (Star bait?)

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/092701hjpic .htm

I don't remember why at the time but it popped into my head to search the Amazon Wishlists. Upon entering an Alghamdi in Florida I found the following wishlist containing references to pilots guides to airports:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/?e ncoding=UTF8&type=wishlist&id=1UWSWIH3NXQJN

take note of the dates the items were added, well before the sept 11 attack, that this individual is ahmad vs ahmed (on the list), and also that no items have been added since this time period.

I immediately reported this to the FBI via their reporting form and suggested that wishlists could be used to openly and safely communicate needs. I never heard anything back so I can only assume it was investigated. If is was however, and found to be suspicious or related, I have no doubt that all open wishlists are now monitored for known aliases.

Note that this person may not be the hijacker. I've oft wondered since if some innocent pilot could be sitting secretly in jail because I found his wishlist.

Actually, the Commodore VIC-20 was the first computer (if you don't count the Atari 2600) to sell 1 million units, at least according to Mike Tomczyk's book.

When the F*cked Company book came out, Amazon soon showed that shoppers also recommended a 3/4 horsepower concrete vibrator.

When the F*cked Company book came out, Amazon soon showed that shoppers also recommended a 3/4 horsepower concrete vibrator.

I love 'The West Wing'. In fact, I like it so much that I've got every single dvd box set (1-6). All purchased from Amazon.

So what did they recommend to me?

This. Yeah - great thanks.

Amusingly, the top uniquely popular DVD for Amazon.com itself is this Classic Erotica Collection - Forbidden Movies from the Brothels of Paris (2000)

They're a strange bunch. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/browse-com munities/-/213203/dvd/002-0276363-6327256

Heh.

Amusingly, the top uniquely popular DVD for Amazon.com itself is this Classic Erotica Collection - Forbidden Movies from the Brothels of Paris (2000)

They're a strange bunch. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/browse-com munities/-/213203/dvd/002-0276363-6327256

Heh.

Quoted directly from the Conditions of Use

LICENSE AND SITE ACCESS

[...]
This license does not include any resale or commercial use of this site or its contents; any collection and use of any product listings, descriptions, or prices; any derivative use of this site or its contents; any downloading or copying of account information for the benefit of another merchant; or any use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.
[...]

Which part of this paragraph does the article writer not understand?
To me it is loud and clear: No data mining allowed. Period.

Either Amazon changed this in the blink of an eye right after this article was posted (which I find very doubtful), or the author may be looking forward to a peppered letter or phone call from Amazon legal department pretty soon.

When they first started the idea, they gave it some PR, but now it's sort of a low man on the totem pole, relegated to the backwaters. When I checked 6400+ cities, only 2800 of them were recording enough activity to warrant a bestseller or "uniquely popular" list.

They generate the 2 types of lists for 5 classes of items: books, CDs, DVDs, toys, and consumer electronics. Now this might not be as potentially compromising as finding out a single person was ordering subversive books. Yet finding out a small town in Alabama's bestselling genre is showtunes is definitely something interesting.

- Greg

I found it interesting that some celebrities appear to have their wish list available as well. Hard to know how much of it is real, since certainly the bigger names would go under a pseudonym, and ordinary joes may just be using the name as an alias, but looking at Steve Job's wish list it appears to list his correct address and birthday, so there may be something to him having a taste for Duke Elington after all.

If that evidence is enough to convince a judge to issue a search warrant and they come in and find pot or whatever, so what. Good for them and someone breaking the law goes to jail. If I put the book on the list and they come and search my house, who cares. I don't have shit to hide, so let 'em search.
I personally think they'll get _shit_ for info out of this and no judge would touch it. They can make all the assumptions they want and fill their big black file cabinets with files on me if they want. I don't fucking care.
Here is my wishlist. Infer all you want, but at least buy me something! Oh, and make sure you search Google (especially Google Images) for my name to find out where I live. Enjoy!
---John Holmes...

Anyone thinking they will get useful information about truly dangerous groups from Google Maps or Amazon Wish Lists needs to take a breather and sit down for a minute.

The first match for "Bible," ironically, was a wishlist containing The Cannabis Grow Bible: The Definitive Guide to Growing Marijuana for Recreational and Medical Use.

I think I'd rather have Five 9-disc "Definitive Edition" sets of the Twilight Zone on DVD with no "new form of DRM" or Internet connection needed to view them.

(Don't know what the effective price per ep is, but man that's a lot of media.)

I bought a USB Radioshark, set it up under Linux, and used Icecast with Liveice to setup realtime streaming.

I then setup a cgi to change stations. Works like a charm.

Save yourself about FOUR BUCKS by buying the book here: Inside Threat. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself about FOUR BUCKS by buying the book here: Inside Threat. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Fripp and Eno recorded the wonderful 'Evening Star' album a good few years ago and I found the video 'Frippertronic' sounds reminiscent of that if mellower. Hey how about the entire 'Index Of metals' for the startup sound; that'll give time to get on with some work in Linux while Vista starts up.

Looks like it already is on DVD but only two DVDs, four episodes per

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-ur l/ref=br_ss_hs/002-0633731-1797615?platform=gurupa &url=index%3Ddvd&field-keywords=get+a+life&Go.x=0& Go.y=0&Go=Go

I'll be passing on it until they release the entire series.

Heh yes. A name right out of Jennifer Government...

I've been re-reading James Martin's books, "Application Development without Programmers" and "System Design from Provably Correct Constructs", with the goal of selecting a method to program mechanical devices.

Martin's thesis, and remember this was back in the 70's and early 80's, was that the program should be generated from a specification of WHAT the program was to do, rather than trying to translate faulty specifications into code telling the computer HOW to do it. (Trust me, that poor sentence does not come close to describing the clarity of purpose in Martin's books.) Martin proposes that a specification language can be rigid enough to generate provably correct programs by combining a few provably correct structures into provably correct libraries from which to derive provably correct systems.

IBM had a major intiative back in the mid-1980s called AD/Cycle which was tied to SAA (System Application Architecture) which was based on these and similar ideas prevalent back then. This is the old "holy grail" and an attempt to fix the waterfall methods of development, which had actually been since the early 1950s with mixed success in delivering software on-time and in-budget.

AD/Cycle involved not only IBM but a number of "AD/Cycle partner" companies like Bachman, and KnowledgeWare. KnowlegeWare's CEO was the former scrambling NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton. A google of "fran tarkenton knowledgeware" will turn up references to Jim Martin, as well as some interesting things about how the company ended up.

An incredible amount of development money went down the rat-hole chasing the AD/Cycle dream.

The problem turns out to be the difficulty, if not impossibility, of creating rigorous specifications which produce useful results in the face of problems which aren't very well understood at the outset. The less the requirement is for a "black box" with well-defined inputs and outputs the more this is likely to be the case.

Many problems turn out to be wicked that there is a feedback loop between the implementation and the requirements. A classic book from the era was Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013590126X/102-5 477977-4320940?v=glance&n=283155) Which might be considered one of the old testament texts pointing to today's "agile development" movement.

A non-software example of a wicked problem is city planning in which implementing changes in the road network, housing developments, shopping center location etc. all change the requirements for the same aspects.

Many wicked problems come from "requirements" which often do (or should or must) come from users. Often, the real requirements aren't known until an implementation is given to the users, who then might say, "yup, you implemented exactly what I asked for, but now that I see it, here's what I really want." Or, "Now that we've added this other thing (application, system, business division) why, doesn't this (work more like/interface with/replace/...) that."

Faced with this, a methodology based on "correct" construction from "rigourous" specifications simply moves the problem to debugging the requirements.

Until we do away with the need to change/adapt systems to changing/evolving requirements, which would likely involve eliminating users, this approach will have limited applicability, and will need to stand beside other more widely used incremental development models.

...they could have used "Wipe Out".

The League of Crafty Guitarists is "the performance wing of Guitar Craft", and Guitar Craft is Robert Fripp's guitar school-thingy. So, the circle is complete.

Anyway. Now at least we know that the sounds in Vista will be nice. That's good. I'm a little worried though, that perhaps the Blue Screen of Death will become Red and "One More Red Nightmare" is blasted out your speakers every time an error/BSOD occurs!

What's scarier is the fact that Robert Fripp's soundscape album from 1997 (not his only soundscape album, no) is so aptly titled "The Gates of Paradise"! amazon link

And perhaps the song titles of that album can give us a hint as to how Fripp feels about mr. Gates:
"The Outer Darkness"
"Abandonment to Divine Providence"
"In Fear And Trembling Of The Lord"
"Acceptance"

I mean, since Microsoft/Gates does rule the universe, or at least one might think that Fripp believes so, we here have a possible explanation to why he agreed to make this Vista "soundtrack"/soundscape/whatever... The other possible explanation is obvious: Fripp likes money.

University officials should be ashamed of themselves. Their purpose is to promote learning. HOWEVER, this is not an issue of rights. No one forced this student to attend this school, or continue his enrollment. And this university is not obligated to continue educating him. This is a matter of business, they have entered into an agreement where money changes hands, with the product being learning.

Mary Ann Glendon's book, Rights Talk , is a good read. Her basic premise is that Americans are calling too many things rights -- and it's a very bad thing. We have a right not to be censored by the government, but this does not extend to private practice. When we start dilluting our concept of rights and liberties, we bring ourselves into the same sort of slippery slope that rights-advocates argue from. If you suddenly have a right to walk your dog, or bad-mouth a professor, the bar gets set lower and lower. At some point, violating rights really isn't a big deal. And that's a scary place to be, because it means we begin to lose the actual rights we have.

So let's stop talking about this in reference to civil liberties. If you want to talk rights abuse, look at the domestic spying flap. But let's not cheapen our rights by including them in this debate.