Slashdot Mirror

Both Elder Scrolls IV and Neverwinter Nights 2 have been pushed way into 2006.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000E0TOKI
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000E0XX9Q
Such a shame.

Both Elder Scrolls IV and Neverwinter Nights 2 have been pushed way into 2006.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000E0TOKI
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000E0XX9Q
Such a shame.

Your professional qualifications mean nothing if you don't fit in with the team your trying to join. Sense of humor is a large part of personality; if your personality doesn't mesh with the team's, you might do more harm than good as part of that team. Everyone really does need to read Peoplware

...is a good guy to write this sort of thing since he's been programming Java for a long time and has also branched out into "dynamic Java" things like Groovy. He's done a bunch of stuff on dbUnit (including a dbUnit chapter in Java Testing Patterns), too. So he's had enough experience with Java to know what's what.

I'm probably biased, though, since Andy also wrote the CPD Ant task.

Well, we all know that it isn't really the viruses and bacteria from that region that we have to worry about, but miniaturized Chinese People.

See this, for example, for a quite an interesting analysis of how disease affected history. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385121229/103-89 20737-8104634?v=glance&n=283155

"Basically, what is important here is not the fact that you are going to learn a certain language, but that you will learn how to write object oriented code."

You may want to consider what books/software are available.

Objects first with Java has uniformly good reviews on Amazon, a supporting website, and of course the designed-for-education BlueJ IDE

Thank you Captain Obvious. I'll take over.

Now we fast forward to 2005 and look at the latest technology helping us in our daily lives:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004SPO3/ 103-6259078-8189458

http://www.brandsonsale.com/cg-003691.html

or my personal favorite:
http://sandalsandsocks.typepad.com/soapbox/2004/05 /useless_gadgets.html

Personally, I'd throw nosehair trimmers, most PDAs, and most feature-laden cell-phones in that bin.

Next Generation continues its end-of-year celebration with a treatise on the 30 finest games of the year.

Come on now. Treatise?

That is not a treatise, that is an article. These are treatises.

treatise a systematic exposition or argument in writing including a methodical discussion of the facts and principles involved and conclusions reached

I wouldn't call a list of video games a systematic exposition.

Next Generation continues its end-of-year celebration with a treatise on the 30 finest games of the year.

Come on now. Treatise?

That is not a treatise, that is an article. These are treatises.

treatise a systematic exposition or argument in writing including a methodical discussion of the facts and principles involved and conclusions reached

I wouldn't call a list of video games a systematic exposition.

Next Generation continues its end-of-year celebration with a treatise on the 30 finest games of the year.

Come on now. Treatise?

That is not a treatise, that is an article. These are treatises.

treatise a systematic exposition or argument in writing including a methodical discussion of the facts and principles involved and conclusions reached

I wouldn't call a list of video games a systematic exposition.

/104-6165473-7972711?n=283155

I have programmed in both Java and C#, but I primarly work in VB.NET. So you should know up front that I like working in Windows. I really like the .NET framework. I can say that using Visual Studio and the .NET framework has made writing code really fun. I would reccomend learning C# if all else is equal, and yes mono does seem to be really popular.

Also, I think that we'll be seeing much more language development in C#. In my opinion, the LINQ (Language Integrated Query) project is the coolest language advancement since OOP. C#, ASP.NET, and the .NET framework just seem to be a little bit ahead of the Linux alternatives, and Visual Studio 2005 is an excellent IDE.

Bottom line though, learn about Object Orient Programming and Design. Learning Patterns is an excellent way to see how to really use OOD. Check out the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Softwareby the "gang of four (gof)" listed under Erich Gamma.

Good Luck, and stick with it, it gets easier, and a good IDE really helps.

Einstein was not "very religious", he was agnostic. From Autobiographical Notes (bolding mine)*:

Thus I came -- though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents -- to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.

As for your assertion about the lack of correlation between intelligence and religion, most studies point to a negative correlation:

All but four of the forty-three polls listed support the conclusion that native intelligence varies inversely with degree of religious faith; i.e., that, other factors being equal, the more intelligent a person is, the less religious he is.

The problems with the idea of leaving out everything that is still theorectical, or has not been unequivocally proven, would be;

• There is not much left to teach but the arts.
• Gravity, relativity, and quantum theories are really just as susceptible to that rational unless the exception that they have been partially proven with mathematics is enough to keep them in schools.
• It is just too dangerous for the United States to ignore good science and let all the other abitious countries take the lead in the technology that can be had by teaching and researching evolution.

Save yourself $10.18 by buying the book here: Firefox Secrets : A Need-To-Know Guide. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $10.18 by buying the book here: Firefox Secrets : A Need-To-Know Guide. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

My conclusions? Sculley was star-struck and too button-down to run a 'geek' company and Gil Amelio was overrated and near to the most arrogant person on Earth. Of course, BIG personalities like theirs fit right into Apple's history along with guys like Mark Markkula, Mike Scott and Mr. Reality Distortion himself.

The hacks writing As the World Turns could never come with anything half as interesting or dramatic as the history of Apple. If there was ever a subject for a movie, this is it.

My conclusions? Sculley was star-struck and too button-down to run a 'geek' company and Gil Amelio was overrated and near to the most arrogant person on Earth. Of course, BIG personalities like theirs fit right into Apple's history along with guys like Mark Markkula, Mike Scott and Mr. Reality Distortion himself.

The hacks writing As the World Turns could never come with anything half as interesting or dramatic as the history of Apple. If there was ever a subject for a movie, this is it.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 0CDC39/sr=1-8/qid=1135346118/ref=sr_1_8/104-703368 6-9256721?_encoding=UTF8&n=3580501&s=gourmet-food& v=glance Just goes to prove that a fool and his money are soon parted.

The dialog is easy and exagerated (makes it easier to pick up). The visuals and the story line will help you follow and understand the conversations.

I did this with "Betty La Fea". As a bonus, it was funny and entertaining. Spanish soaps arent like US soaps. They start, go for a while, and then FINISH. They're more like miniseries than anything else. Very elaborate and well done (most of them).

Plus the women are invariably hot.

Try "Amor Real", "Rubi", "Bety La Fea" (If you can find it)

Tons more listed here. But you'll have to figure out which are on DVD.

The dialog is easy and exagerated (makes it easier to pick up). The visuals and the story line will help you follow and understand the conversations.

I did this with "Betty La Fea". As a bonus, it was funny and entertaining. Spanish soaps arent like US soaps. They start, go for a while, and then FINISH. They're more like miniseries than anything else. Very elaborate and well done (most of them).

Plus the women are invariably hot.

Try "Amor Real", "Rubi", "Bety La Fea" (If you can find it)

Tons more listed here. But you'll have to figure out which are on DVD.

when you have to write extremely high-performance applications that needs to scale to thousands of users, both EJBs and JMSs become godsends.

I'm afraid we'll have to disagree on this point. I have had to write code for very high performance environments (> 1000 req/sec) and I'm convinced that EJB just won't scale the way a properly designed POJO system will. And it's not just performance either. EJB development is far more prone to errors since it's much more difficult to unit test. I've done it the EJB way and I'll never do it that way again.

You're right about JMS though...it's almost essential in a lot of situations (though if I can help it, I like to use an ESB on top of it in case I need some extra flexibility at a later date).

Not that I've hidden it particularly well, but I'm definitely an adherant to the Spring philosophy. If you're at all curious, take a look at Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB. They make a really good case for avoiding EJB completely (backed up by a strong resume of successful large-scale projects).

I'm Spanish from Catalonia, so my mother tongues are Spanish and Catalan. I can also speak English and Japanese, and now I'm learning Chinese (Mandarin). I also understand Galician/Portuguese (my grandparents were from Galicia and spoke it at home), but that doesn't count because I cannot speak it.

I don't know what are the best methods for learning a language, but at least I can tell you what works for me.

Vocabulary:

Read books in the language they were written (the one you're trying to learn). Underline with a red pen every single word that you don't understand and look it up in a dictionary. Each time you find the same word again and still don't remember its meaning, underline it again and look it up in the dictionary once more. Continue reading until you finish the book.

What I like about this method is that I get visual feedback of how my vocabulary is growing. The first chapters of my books are a mess of underlined words, and they progressively get cleaner as you look the pages further into the book.

Hearing:

In my opinion, DVDs are the best tool for training your listening and pronounciation. They get bonus points because you have fun while you learn. The keyword here is "subtitles".

When I was still working on improving my English listening some years ago, I used to buy lots of American/English films on DVD and watch them in their original version, with English subtitles. Since I could read what the actors were saying, I was able to learn the pronounciation of many words. Back then I was still living in Spain, so this was the only way I had to listen to real English.

With Japanese the situation it's a bit different. The problem with Japanese is reading, so I did it in two steps: before coming to Japan, I watched Japanese movies in Japanese with Spanish (or English) subtitles in order to learn vocabulary.

Now I've been living in Japan for almost four years and my vocabulary is (relatively) good, so I'm working on my reading/writing skills. What I do is watching these same Japanese films, but with Japanese subtitles. That allows me to link words with their written kanji form. Japanese TV is very good for this, as they like to subtitle everything.

Please note that I was using this book to study Japanese at the same time.

Also, remember that the more languages you know, the easier it will be to learn new ones.

Apparently you are less educable than the typical grade schooler.

There are whole goddamn books, such as John Maynard Smith's excellent book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521 451280/qid=1135295014/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i4_xgl 14/104-6105266-3267137?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

which are available for you to read, instead of asking confusing questions on Slashdot and expecting to get good answers from a guy calling himself "sickofthisshit".

While reading it, try adopting the mindset (temporarily, if you like) that evolution is true, and when you are confused, it is because you misunderstand rather than your having found some mistake in the theory that has somehow escaped the finest minds in biology over the last 150 years.

This seems to be a topic that it easier to think about than talk about. As you suggest in the title of your original post, a lot of the problem can be mere semantics. Or to paraphrase the old adventure game, we seem to be facing a maze of twisty little metaphors all alike.

Another possible source of disagreement is the perspective of where we are coming from and where we want to go. I am trying to reconcile my "Physics" view of the world with my spiritual view. In particular I am interested in exploring the connections (if any) between the mathematical ideas exposed by Godel's Theorems and my experiences of self-awareness and consciousness. I see some very interesting parallels between the mathematical techniques used to "tame" Godel's Theorems and some of the common threads that run through many of the great spiritual paths.

Another source of difference is our personal experiences. I was extremely struck by my first instant of self-awareness. My realization of the hall of mirrors occurred many years later and was beautiful and dizzying but was not nearly so profound. What was almost as profound was my appreciation of the existence of the consciousness of others. The metaphor I find most useful for this experience is Indra's Net where each jewel in the net is a consciousness that reflects all of reality.

Perhaps your experience was vastly different from my own. Maybe you were given the hall of mirrors as mediation topic or a koan and it led you to a profound experience.

In your original post you had asked if there was any AI or evolutionary psychology definitions of self-awareness. The best (in fact, only) scientific definition I know of is the mathematical one discovered by Godel and explained in Smullyan's book.

I admit that it might seem foolhardy to try to make any link between the mathematics of Godel and human consciousness. This path is certainly filled with traps that have already caught many. For a while I despaired that anything more than weird coincidences and wild speculation would be impossible. But then I found E. T. Jaynes' book Probability Theory : The Logic of Science and my hopes increased. Jaynes mathematically defines an optimal "plausible reasoner" and makes several compelling arguments why our own personal models of reality should follow the same rules as the plausible reasoner.

It may never be possible to prove that results similar to Godel's apply to human consciousness. But it might be possible to apply Godel's ideas to Jaynes' plausible reasoner. Any non-trivial results would be extremely interesting and would help give us insights into human consciousness even though we can't prove mathematically that they apply to consciousness. AFAIK, very little (if any) of the non-trivial things that have been said about human consciousness can be proven mathematically.

I am not looking for proofs, for now I am content to examine the analogy and see how the concepts discovered by Godel relate to similar ideas in some of the major spiritual paths. I don't think I can change anyone's beliefs, but I hope to develop a very well defined vocabulary so that practitioners of various paths could say "yes this is what I am talking about" or "no that is not what I mean".

At best it would be a precise language with which to discuss consciousness and spiritual matters, at worst it would be all:

That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.

I suggest This book and cd.

However this is only 1% of what you need. The other 99% is the actual drive to learn and study it EVERY DAY. When you take language classes in college (a good way to learn a foreign language in my opinion) you initially go 1 hour every day for a semester (about 18 weeks). That covers about 1/2 the language. The second semester covers the second half. That is approx 18 weeks X 5 days X 1 hour. This doesn't include time studying for tests and vocab quizes. I'd say I average about 3 hours studying a week in my current language class in addition to class time. That makes it 18 X 5 X 1 (90 hours) + 3hours X 18 weeks (54 hours studying outside class) or a total of 144 hours for 1 semester. If you want to get the grammar down and have a good knowledge doubling this is a good guess. 288 Hours.

Now you may need more than me because I already speak 4 languages. After you've learned a second the subsequent ones are easier. My grammar comprehension is better in all my foreign languages and my spelling is better too (too much cheating on spelling tests in middle school I guess).

Here's a bonus to Spanish. The grammar is very similar to French, Italian, Portuguese and of course it's base of Latin. Once you learn spanish these are easy to pick up.

What you should do (in my opinion) without taking formal classes:
1. Buy the CD/Book. (Online is WAY cheaper than in the store)
2. Plan to study 1 hour a day at least (M-F) hell you can do it while working out if you want to get really healthy too (that's when I do about half my vocab studying)
3. Once going through the book start translating an article a day from a foreign newspaper.
4. Then start recording your conversations and translating them real-time in your head to your new language.
5. Picture Salma Heyek as your prize. You'll learn for certain then!
6. Find some foreign friends to get beers with... Beers make you more confident in speaking (at least for most people that aren't extraverted freaks like me!).

bonne chance!

The woman learned to rotate the plate. But knowing the cake was still there did not enable her to percieve the cake. Now, I'm going on Minsky's "Society of Mind" here, but think of the brain as being a bundle of subroutines, and subroutines pass information to each other. A segment of the mind invoved with perceiving "left" died in the woman. Even though she was intelligent and could learn to cope with this damage, she could not gain back all of what she lost. I suppose a damaged driver is the closest example on a computer. I've had situations where the computer knew the printer was there, knew the inks were there, but it lost the ability to print blue. For computers, updating the driver is enough to repair the problem. We can't update "drivers" in the human brain, and some of them are hard-wired in.

The mind is a bizarre creation. We think of ourselves as logical and able to adapt, but anyone with a brain injury or depression understands that our brains lie to us at the best of times, and when something goes wrong, the mind can be downright treacherous.

Interesting try, but...

Try it. Imagine putting a piece of cake with two colors of icing on a plate. With a mirror in back. On the left, the icing is pale blue, on the right it's pink. The cake in the mirror has pale blue on the left and pink on the right. Eat the pink piece. The blue (left) piece is still on the left in both reality and the image.

Our brains do not work the way we think they do. There's a book, titled "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales." The example of the woman who forgot about "left" is in there, or some other book by Oliver Sacks.

(URLs truncated to strip out referals: I'm not trying to make my living off of book referals! The Tinfoil Hat Brigade can relax.)

Interesting try, but...

Try it. Imagine putting a piece of cake with two colors of icing on a plate. With a mirror in back. On the left, the icing is pale blue, on the right it's pink. The cake in the mirror has pale blue on the left and pink on the right. Eat the pink piece. The blue (left) piece is still on the left in both reality and the image.

Our brains do not work the way we think they do. There's a book, titled "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales." The example of the woman who forgot about "left" is in there, or some other book by Oliver Sacks.

(URLs truncated to strip out referals: I'm not trying to make my living off of book referals! The Tinfoil Hat Brigade can relax.)

Yes, a desire is what starts you down the path. But it's not what sees you through to the finish.

Your desire to become 'enlightened' is what gets you to start meditating in the morning, paying attention to your breathing, becoming aware of the habits of your mind. Once you start getting in the habit of being aware, the awareness is what begins to destroy the ego. Habitual awareness breaks down the ego and kills desire. The initial desire starts the practicing of awareness, which leads to habitual awareness.

What the Buddha Taught by Rahula is an excellent book. Rahula is a Buddhist monk, but this book is often used as a college-level introduction to Buddhism. And that's just a straight link, not a merchant program referral.

You're looking at the total sales charts for the year. I was talking about the daily sales charts. Y'know, the one you see if you click DVD on the main page.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/130/ ref=two_tab_d/002-8538762-7860861

Right hand side right there. Sales for the whole year tend to be a little low for films released 10 days before the year ends, after all.

This is Kazzahdrane, btw. At my mum's and it seems I've forgotten my /. password...

Sure people criticize the government, as the constitution allows. But that doesn't stop the right wing from yelling "Treason!" anytime they are criticized. Hell, just this week Bush described the person who leaked what could turn out to be the single most important news story since Watergate as "shameful". Personally, I find the presidents absolute contempt for the most fundamental laws of our land far, far more shameful.

There is a much deeper problem in the title than this. It is, quite simply, impossible for one being to prove its self-awareness to another. We may be able to make some sort of educated guess as to things being self-aware, but there is no way we can directly observe or experience the self-awareness of another being. This is by definition, since self-awareness is that recognition of one's own existence a a separate entity that is unique to and inseparable from that entity - it is not merely the reaction of the bio-machine to its environment no matter how complex and seemingly independent that reaction.

The Star Trek TNG episode "The Measure of A Man" gives a fairly good explanation of the problem. Even if we develop a non-biological machine that mimics in all respects the behaviour of a human, down to the finest of details, we will have no way of determining whether that machine is self-aware. A corollory of this is that we have no way of determining if any particular machine is not self-aware. You are probably fairly confident your computer is not self-aware, but just try proving it. If you think that you can prove something is, or is not, self-aware, then you have probably not understood the problem.

Doesn't look like "Because it would be really geeky to own one" is going to cut it.

Probably not. However, it might be fairly geeky to own a copy of Lunar Sourcebook: A User's Guide to the Moon (the definitive volume housing all the geological data collected by the US and Russia on lunar samples returned to the Earth), and not just because copies of it are expensive and fairly difficult to find.

Save yourself $16.98 off list price by buying the book here: Innovation Happens Elsewhere, First Edition : Open Source as Business Strategy. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $16.98 off list price by buying the book here: Innovation Happens Elsewhere, First Edition : Open Source as Business Strategy. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

What? As far as I can tell, Serinity isn't on the top of any lists at Amazon, and sure isn't in the top 20 by sales (though Firefly is #16 - not #6). In fact, going through all of the top 100, Serinity isn't even in the list, let along on top. I can't imagine that there was a run on all of those (Carmen Electra's Fit to Strip and Chappele's Show?) in the less-than-24-hours since this was posted, so I'd sure appreciate a pointer to the "sales list" that Serinity is topping at Amazon... The only list I found it on was the "SciFi editors picks" list, where it's just #4, right above "Star Wars: Clone Wars, the animated piece of crap" - and that's just what the Amazon editors liked, regardless of sales. Well, it's also on "sec127's 'Movies I will buy on DVD'" list, but it's not even top of that list. Titanic is above Serinity there.

What? As far as I can tell, Serinity isn't on the top of any lists at Amazon, and sure isn't in the top 20 by sales (though Firefly is #16 - not #6). In fact, going through all of the top 100, Serinity isn't even in the list, let along on top. I can't imagine that there was a run on all of those (Carmen Electra's Fit to Strip and Chappele's Show?) in the less-than-24-hours since this was posted, so I'd sure appreciate a pointer to the "sales list" that Serinity is topping at Amazon... The only list I found it on was the "SciFi editors picks" list, where it's just #4, right above "Star Wars: Clone Wars, the animated piece of crap" - and that's just what the Amazon editors liked, regardless of sales. Well, it's also on "sec127's 'Movies I will buy on DVD'" list, but it's not even top of that list. Titanic is above Serinity there.

I think Card started out as a playwright before switching to novels.

Just because someone demonstrates expertise in both novel-writing and playwriting doesn't mean they can write a good screen play. (Though if I had to bet on whether someone can write a good first screen play I wouldn't hesitate to put my money on Card.)

It forces competitors to come up with something new and something better.

You want to write a successful series of children's books? You don't need Narnia and you don't need Hogwarts: A Series of Unfortunate Events

It is quite common it seems. Ian Plimer (a bit rough around the edges) described this behaviour in Telling Lies for God: Reason vs Creationism

Rather sad behaviour really

Sounds like a Miss Hazelstone moment....

Well worth a read, if you like to embarrass yourself by bursting out in uncontrollable laughter on a train/bus/whatever. And no, it's not an affiliate link or anything like that :-)

Simon

If you like Firefly, check out Wonder Falls

Its execed by Tim Minear, Todd Holland, and (someone else, i can't remember). If it isn't Firefly's equal, it is darn close. Check it out!

Amazon.com eh? ;-) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593074492/qid=11 35121589/sr=8-4/ref=pd_bbs_4/002-4543861-8072831?n =507846&s=books&v=glance All three Serenity comics in a trade paperback. Released Jan 25th 2006. I haven't read the comics myself but I've heard they're very in-keeping with the feel of the show so I'll certainly be picking up this collection when it's available. Since Joss is definately writing more I'm hoping the comics become a regular thing, a couple of story arcs a year perhaps. The guy certainly has enough ideas for future storylines.

Um, you mean like this one? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743222229/qid=11 35121543/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-8616764-6176631?n =507846&s=books&v=glance

There are a couple ways you can go. ;)

It's important to include the relevant google links for your searches:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Bea+Arthur+humping+ a+Camel&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a &rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
(and the top hit):
http://www.shanmonster.com/archives/searchterms.ht ml

http://www.google.com/search?q=Shannon+Doherty+doi ng+coke+off+a+dead+hookers+butt&start=0&ie=utf-8&o e=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:off icial
(and the top hit):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00003CY67/002-33 64891-9190430?v=glance&vi=quotes-trivia&n=130
(of course, google thinks maybe you meant: Shannon Doherty doing coke of a dead hookers butt
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&hs=EoT&safe=off &client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q =Shannon+Doherty+doing+coke+of+a+dead+hookers+butt &spell=1
(for which the top hit is the same)

Maybe you meant to include the quotes, in which case:
Your search - "Bea Arthur humping a Camel" - did not match any documents.
(yet, i'm sure their index of slashdot will pull it up soon)

also no luck with
Your search - "Shannon Doherty doing coke off a dead hookers butt" - did not match any documents.
same result for 'of'

All in all, the bea arthur hits are more interestingly relevant than you might expect.

You break even only if your net (not gross!) return equals your production costs, marketing and distribution expenses.

Amazon is offering Firefly-The Complete Series and Serenity for $47. Firefly

Both the series and the film are currently in the top ten selling items on Amazon.com. The film is above Star Wars III, which, considering it's heritage, is a mighty achievement. Okay, so the DVD of the film was only released today, so it may very well quickly disappear, but the series has been a consistant seller for 2/3 years now - really, the reason a film was made.